i i' i 

Ji'j' ' 



I 




NINE LECTURES 

ON 

PREACHING. 



NINE LECTURES 



PREACHING, 



NINE LECTURES 



ON 



PREACHING. 



DELIVERED AT YALE COLLEGE, NEW HAVEN, CONN. 

J 




/ 



R. W. DALE, D.D., 

Birmingham. 



Immo vero audi quod dicis, quicumque dicis; ft qui vis te audiri prior 
TE AUDI. — Augustine. 



. .^ 




A. S. BARNES AND COMPANY, 
NEW YORK, CHICAGO, AND NEW ORLEANS. 

1878. 

t 



OF Congress 



WASHINGTON 






BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



THE ATONEMENT. 

THE CONGREGATIONAL UNION LECTURE 
FOR 1875. 

§03 pp. l^mo, cloth. 
PRICE $2.00. 



Copyright^ 1877, by A. S. Barnes &= Co. 



PREFACE. 

IF I rightly understand the objects for which the 
Lyman Beecher Lectureship was founded, the 
Lecturer is not expected to deliver a complete and 
systematic course on Homiletics. He discharges his 
duty if he offers to the students whom he has the 
honour of addressing those practical suggestions 
with regard to the work of the Christian Preacher 
which have been verified by his own experience and 
observation. 

It is possible that the religious thought and life of 
America are in some respects so different from the 
religious thought and life of England, that very much 
of what I have written may be of no service to those 
who are being educated for the American ministry. 
But I was obliged to speak of the work of the 
Christian Preacher as I know it best. I have tried to 
strike hard at the evils which seem to me to lessen 
the power of the ministry in England ; I have tried 
to strike hardest at the evils which have lessened the 



PREFACE. 



power of my own ministry. If these are evils which 
the students at Yale have no reason to fear, let them 
be thankful. If I had a larger knowledge of the 
Churches and of the ministry of the United States, I 
have sufficient faith in American generosity to believe 
that I should have given no offence had I attempted 
to discuss the special duties and dangers of the 
American preacher, as they appear to the eye of an 
Englishman. If any American minister would tell 
us English preachers, with perfect frankness, what he 
supposes to be our special defects and our special 
perils, we should receive his criticisms with cordial 
gratitude. But my knowledge of America did not 
justify me in making any such attempt. 

I felt that the honour conferred upon me when I 
was invited to deliver these Lectures was so great 
that I was not at liberty to decline the invitation. 
I was bound to do what I could. The President and 
Fellows and Theological Faculty of Yale will, I trust, 
receive my assurance that if my power had been equal 
to my will I should have served them better. 

R. W. DALE. 

Birmingham, 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 



PAGH 

INTRODUCTORY : PERILS OF YOUNG PREACHERS ... I 



LECTURE IL 

THE INTELLECT IN RELATION TO PREACHING 27 

LECTURE in. 

READING •.• ... 6^ 

LECTURE IV. 

READING (concluded) , 90 

LECTURE V. 

the preparation of SERMONS • II 6 

LECTURE VI. 

extemporaneous PREACHING AND STYLE 15I 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE VIL 

EVANGELISTIC PREACHING 182 

LECTURE VIIL 

PASTORAL PREACHING 221 

LECTURE IX. 

THE CONDUCT OF PUBLIC worship: CONCLUSION ... 263 



LECTURE I. 

INTRODUCTORY : PERILS OF YOUNG PREACHERS. 

GENTLEMEN,— My first duty is to express to 
the Theological Faculty and to the President and 
Fellows of this University my sense of the honour they 
have done me in nominating and appointing me to 
this lectureship. The illustrious services which Yale 
has rendered to the intellectual activity and culture 
of America, and the eminent learning of the long 
succession of its graduates and professors, might have 
made me shrink from accepting the distinction ; but 
to have refused it would have been an ungracious 
return to your courtesy and kindness. 

When I received the invitation to deliver this course 
of lectures, you had recently completed the centenary 
of your national independence. Perhaps that celebra- 
tion may have made you more vividly conscious than 
ever that, although the political ties which once united 
the States of this great Republic to the ancient mon- 
archy of England are severed, Americans and Eng- 
lishmen still belong to the same race. It may have 
reminded you that the most heroic and glorious 
periods in the political history of the English people, 
the noblest names in our literature, the most sacred 



INTR OD UC TOR V. [lect. 



traditions of our Churches, are yours as well as ours. 
It may have renewed and deepened your generous 
afifection for us. Gentlemen, I believe that every 
patriotic American and every patriotic Englishman, 
every wise and thoughtful Christian man on the other 
side of the Atlantic as well as on this, desires to draw 
closer and to strengthen those ties between the in- 
tellectual and religious life of the two countries, which 
the disruption of former political relations could not 
dissolve ; and it is partly because I share this desire 
that I am here to-day. 

In preparing these lectures, one consideration greatly 
relieved the anxiety from which it was impossible that 
I should altogether escape. I remembered that when 
you come to England you come to see the monu- 
ments and memorials of ancient life and manners. 
You care very much more for the cathedrals at Canter- 
bury, Lincoln, and York, than for the new Houses of 
Parliament at Westminster. The Warwickshire lanes 
in which Shakspeare courted Ann Hathaway three 
hundred years ago, lanes with hedges which are as 
green to-day as they were in Shakspeare's time, and 
in which the same wild roses were growing last summer 
that he picked to make a wreath for her hair, are 
more attractive to you than the best railway line in 
the country ; and to you, Shakspeare's house at 
Stratford-on-Avon is more interesting than any of the 
splendid mansions built for successful merchants and 
stockbrokers at South Kensington or Knightsbridge. 
Nor is your interest wholly absorbed in those ancient 



LECT. I .] INTR OD UC TOR Y. 



buildings which are attractive for their stately and 
noble architecture, or in those places which have the 
charm of association with famous names. Rude cot- 
tages by the roadside, or on village greens, cottages 
in which successive generations of obscure peasants 
have lived and died, and in which hardly a beam or a 
stone has been changed since the time of the Com- 
monwealth ; sleepy country towns lying remote from 
railways, and almost untouched by the life and stir of 
the present century ; these also interest you, for at 
home you have nothing old except the rocks, the moun- 
tains, the stars, and the sea. 

This seems to me to explain why an Englishm.an was 
nominated to this lectureship. Freshness, originality, 
brilliance — these the Theological Faculty and Corpora- 
tion of Yale could find in abundance in this country. 
An Englishman was sent for, that for once you might 
have the opportunity of listening to lectures containing 
nothing fresh, nothing that should have the look of 
novelty, nothing but what had been familiar to men 
for hundreds of years, nothing but what was trite and 
commonplace. 

And, gentlemen, I am increasingly disposed to 
value the trite and the commonplace, especially in 
everything that relates to the practical ordering of 
life and the securing of the great ends of human exist- 
ence. With Nathaniel Culverwel, I always "reverence 
a grey-headed truth." When a truth comes to me which 
has been reasserted year after year for centuries, it 
comes with the sanction and authority, not of an in- 

2 * 



4 THE VIRTUE OF COMMONPLACES, [lect. i. 

dividual man, but of successive generations of men. 
Our time in this world is too short for experiments the 
issue of which is uncertain. In the great affairs of life 
we can afford to risk nothing. It is as if we were making 
our way across a mountainous and perilous country, 
through which we had never travelled before : we arc 
bound to reach the distant hospice on the other side 
of the great pass before the darkness sets in. We 
cannot venture on doubtful and unknown paths. Here 
is the well-beaten track under our feet ; let us keep to 
it. It may not be quite the shortest way ; it may not 
take us through all the grandeur and sublimity which 
bolder pedestrians might see ; we may miss a pictu- 
resque waterfall, a remarkable glacier, a charming view ; 
but the track will bring us safe to our quarters for the 
night. Yes, I repeat that in all that affects the 
supreme objects of life, I believe in the trite and the 
commonplace ; and anyhow, just as in directing a 
stranger among the hills we feel obliged to point out 
to him the regular path, even though we ourselves 
might venture now and then to get away from it, so in 
giving advice to others we should be very cautious how 
we diverge from the conclusions which have been es- 
tablished by long experience and the general consent 
of wise men. 

It is no part of my duty to say anything about your 
general studies. But you will allow me to express 
the earnest hope that you have so caught the en- 
thusiasm for intellectual pursuits which ought to 
characterise a great university like this, that it is im- 



LECT. I.] COLLEGE LIFE THE GOLDEN AGE. 5 

possible for you to find without regret how rapidly 
session after session is drifting away, and how soon 
your studies in this place will be over. Never again, 
gentlemen, will you have such days of unbroken 
leisure for sustained and persistent intellectual work 
as you have now. Nor can the freshness and genial 
excitement of your student life ever return. In the 
soul's early admiration of the great achievements of 
human genius there is all the passion and joy and 
romance of first love ; and the consciousness of the 
capacity for appreciating them is the verification of 
our own intellectual kinship with theologians, philo- 
sophers, poets, and orators, whose thought and passion 
have given life and strength and security to nations. 
There are none of us that have reached the iron age 
of conflict with the stubborn evils which afflict our 
race, who do not look back with something of sadness 
to the quiet, blessed years of our college life, the true 
golden age of our history. 

But the heart of man is always restless, and I have 
no doubt that many of you are sometimes impatient 
for the days of energetic action which lie before you ; 
and it is right that the thought of your future work 
should fill your heart, and that the earnest desire 
to be doing something towards lessening the sor- 
rows and sins of men should occasionally master 
your intellectual enthusiasm. If, however, you are to 
be good preachers by-and-by, it is necessary that you 
should be hard students now. " For everything there 
is a season, and a t m for every purpose under 



6 A SIN TO NEGLECT COLLEGE WORK. [lect. i. 

heaven." Impatience is not zeal. To despise present 
duties is not the way to prepare for duties yet to come. 
Self-conceit and intellectual indolence may sometimes 
disguise themselves under the form of eagerness to be 
preaching the gospel of Christ. Your life at the 
university is not merely a decent path to the ministry, 
but a preparation for it ; and your future strength and 
success will be largely determined by the intensity of 
your devotion to the pursuits which claim — not your 
time and labour merely — but your very soul, within 
these walls. 

You are Christ's servants — His " slaves," to use the 
title by which St. Paul delighted to describe himself. 
The work He has given you to do just now is your 
university work. Morning by morning, when the 
class-bell rings, " the tale of bricks " should be ready. 
You may sometimes find your work wearisome, and 
may be ready to think it unprofitable. There is 
nothing cheerful and exciting in Hebrew paradigms. 
The intricacies of the Gnostic heresies may sometimes 
seem very dull. But if you think that Christ meant 
you to come to the university, you must also think 
that He meant you to do the work of the university 
heartily. For a student to be careless in getting up 
his Hebrew verbs, or the chapters set him in Church 
history, is a sin ; just as it is a sin for a preacher to 
be careless in preparing a sermon. Whatever work a 
Christian man does, is work that has to be done for 
Christ ; and if we are negligent in the doing of it, we 
ought to confess our sin with sorrow and shame, and 
to ask Christ's forgiveness. 



LECT. I.] INTELLECTUAL DISCIPLINE. 7 

You ought also to remember that for purposes of 
intellectual discipline, a study which repels you is 
invaluable. If a professor found among his students 
a man who followed with equal eagerness every 
subject included in the ordinary scheme of studies, I 
am inclined to think that it would be the professor's 
duty to discover for that student's special benefit a 
subject that he would find offensive and intolerable. 
It is the very intention of a university course to enable 
a man to read — not what he likes, but what he does 
not like ; to develop — not those intellectual muscles 
which are already healthy and vigorous, but those 
which are so weak that the slightest strain upon them 
is unwelcome while it lasts and leaves pain behind. 
Throughout life it is a wise practice to have always 
on hand two very different kinds of intellectual work 
— work which is a pleasure to us, for in that direction 
probably our true strength lies ; and work which is 
a trouble to us, for by thatoMx intellectual defects will 
probably be modified and corrected. Be thankful for 
the studies which are a drudgery to you ; never evade 
them, or, to use a fitter word — I do not know whether 
it is in use in America — never " scamp " them. They 
will give you what will be one of the chief elements 
of your power by-and-by, a despotic control over all 
your intellectual faculties, which will enable you to 
compel them to do their work, and to do it thoroughly, 
when they are most disposed to rebel. 

I trust that, without giving offence to the learned 
professors who have charge of other departments, I 



8 DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [lect. i. 

may be permitted to. utter an earnest and emphatic 
protest against the disposition to speak disparagingly 
and contemptuously of dogmatic theology — the very 
queen of the sciences. The mere intellectual interest 
of this regal study should protec; it against dishonour. 
The gradual development, through successive genera- 
tions, of vast theological systems is at least as noble 
an object of investigation as the gradual formation of 
the material world beneath our feet. These systems 
have also their fauna and \}i\€\x flora, and perpetuate 
the memory of types of human life and thought — 
some of them beautiful, some of them terrible, some 
of them grotesque — which have now quite disappeared. 
You will find in them the craters of extinct volcanoes, 
which once poured out rivers of flame and clouds of 
smoke that darkened the very heavens. They have 
had their glacier periods and their periods of torrid 
heat. The history of the evolution of the Calvinistic 
theory of the Divine government during the ages that 
lie between Augustine and Francis Turretin is quite as 
remarkable as the history of the formation of the ter- 
tiary strata ; and a sentence of the Athanasian creed, 
with the impress upon it of the subtle theories and 
protracted controversies from which it derived its pre- 
cise form, is quite as curious a subject of study as a 
remarkable fossil in the limestone. Nor can we use 
the commonest theological terms intelligently without 
a knowledge of the roots from which they sprang — 
roots lying, some of them, far away in the obscure but 
daring speculations of Alexandria, and others in the 



LECT. I.] DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. 9 

philosophical systems of ancient Greece. For the 
very words of the great moral sciences are living 
things ; they are not an artificial manufacture, like the 
technical terms of the physical sciences ; they have 
come from the very life and soul of man ; they tell the 
story of the deepest thoughts and most tragic struggles 
of the race, of its sins and its sanctity, its darkest fears 
and its divinest hopes. Nor can those who sneer at 
theology, if they think at all on the relations of the 
human soul to God, escape the necessity of finding 
some answer to the questions which theology attempts 
to solve, even if the only answer is that the questions 
are insoluble. And, for my part, I refuse to concur in 
the confession — very lightly and flippantly made by 
some men — that the subjects included in the range of 
theological science are inaccessible to us. Made in 
the image of God, with the history in our hands of a 
wonderful revelation of God to our race, and with the 
Spirit of God permanently abiding in the Church, we 
may know something of the nature of God and of His 
moral relations to mankind. 

But the very craving for knowledge of this kind and 
the necessity of satisfying it will expose some of you 
to a serious peril. You will enter upon your ministry 
with many of the largest and deepest theological 
problems unsolved. Montesquieu said : " II faut avoir 
beaucoup etudie pour savoir peu," ^ which, being 
freely translated, amounts to this — that in order to 
know nothing, it is necessary that a man should have 
^ " Pensees Di verses." 



ro THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES. [lect. i. 

studied a great deal. This is especially true in relation 
to philosophy and theology. When we begin we seem 
to know everything ; when we have been at work for 
three or four years we are confounded by discovering 
how much that we thought we knew has vanished. In 
these times, at least, however it may have been fifty 
years ago, a theological student who has any intellec- 
tual activity is sure to find that when his theological 
course is over his theological studies have only just 
begun. 

Your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, as God manifest 
in the flesh, may be strong and deep ; you may wor- 
ship Him from your very heart ; His will may be your 
supreme law and His glory your supreme end ; you 
may rely upon Him with habitual and unfaltering 
confidence as the very fountain of spiritual light and 
life and strength ; and yet you may be unable for a 
long time to determine whether the Creed commonly 
known as the Creed of Athanasius defines accurately 
the eternal relations of the eternal Son of God to the 
eternal Father, or whether those relations have been 
more accurately defined by any modern theologian. 
You may be uncertain whether the Divine Person who 
became incarnate in Christ is rightly spoken of as 
having been the Son of God before the incarnation. 
While confessing His eternal and proper Deity, and 
acknowledging that " in Him were all things created 
that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and 
invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or 
principalities, or powers : all things were created by 



LECT. I.] THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTLES. ii 

Him and for [et9, unto] him;" you may hesitate to 
acknowledge the absokite equaHty of the eternal Son 
or the eternal Word to the Father, and may be 
disposed to believe that in the mysterious life of 
the Trinity there are relations of supremacy and 
subordination. 

Questions of a different kind may remain for a 
time unsettled. You may be unable to form a con- 
ception of the relations between the Divine personality 
of the Lord Jesus Christ and His humanity, which shall 
seem consistent with the limitations of His knowledge, 
the development of His human perfection, and His 
accessibility to temptation. 

There are other questions relating to the Lord 
Jesus Christ for which you may find it difficult to dis- 
cover any satisfactory solution. Is the Lord Jesus 
Christ in any real sense the root of the whole human 
race } Is there in all men, as the result of their natural 
union with Him, a higher life, which is their true light ? 
Does this life reveal itself in those that refuse to be- 
lieve in Christ as well as in those that believe in Him } 
Does it reveal itself in heathen as well as in Christian 
lands } Is it in all men the source of moral intuitions 
which, however faint and however obscure, bear wit- 
ness to the authority of the eternal law of righteousness } 
Is it in all men the source of thoughts which " wander 
through eternity," and of yearnings for the infinite and 
unknown, yearnings which, however vague and how- 
ever ineffectual, are the invincible proof that the human 
race is akin to God } Or, on the other hand, is the 



12 THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES. [lect. i. 

Divine life wholly absent from those who are not in the 
highest sense " in Christ," as the result of their per- 
sonal faith in Him ? 

You may also be unable for a long time to construct 
any theory on the relation between the death of the 
Lord Jesus Christ and human redemption. You may 
believe that the death of the Lord Jesus Christ was 
an expiation for human sin, that it is the objective 
ground on which God forgives the sins of men ; but 
what relation there is between His death and the 
Divine forgiveness you may be unable to discover. 
To discover it you will have to investigate the relation 
between the Divine Will and the Eternal Law of 
Righteousness, and between the Lord Jesus Christ 
and the race for which He died ; and you will have to 
determine the nature of punishment, and the unique 
character of the Divine act which we describe as the 
remission of sins. 

It is possible that before you leave this university 
you may have arrived at definite conclusions on some 
of these great and difficult theological problems ; but 
if you have settled them all, and if you begin your 
ministry with your theological system completely de- 
veloped, there must be a vast and inexplicable dif- 
ference between the present position of theological 
speculation in America and in England. I believe that 
no such difference exists. The disorganisation of the 
older systems of theological thought is as complete 
among you as among us ; the work of reconstruction 
is no farther advanced on this sid-e of the Atlantic than 



LECT. I.] THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES. 13 

on the other ; the theological students of Yale have the 
same perplexities and uncertainties as the theological 
students of the old country ; and you will have to 
begin to preach while the great task of organising your 
theological theories is still unfinished. 

In England some young preachers transfer the 
process of constructing their systematic theology from 
the study to the pulpit ; some young preachers in 
America may commit the same mistake. A friend 
of mine who had just left college said to me a few 
weeks ago, " A minister, when he is just beginning to 
preach, must sometim.es write a sermon to clear his 
own mind on a subject." But a sermon which is 
written to " clear the mind " of the preacher will be 
very likely to perplex and confuse the minds of the 
hearers. It would strike you as very odd if a 
politician told you that he had made a speech in 
Congress in order to clear his own mind on the true 
economical doctrine about " hard money " and a paper 
currency : you would say that he ought to be sure 
about the doctrine before he prepared his speech. 

If you are trying to settle any grave and important 
theological question, let your investigations be carried 
on in your study. You may do well to write as you 
think, for we very often discover that an argument, 
a conception, a theory, which seemed vigorous and 
beautiful in its disembodied form, becomes incoherent 
and wholly unsatisfactory as soon as it is fixed in 
words and transferred to paper. But say nothing till 
you have something to say. Even when we have 



14 THEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES. [lect. i. 

reached a conclusion which seems satisfactory, it does 
not follow that we should make known our discovery 
in our next sermon. Delay will enable us to revise 
our position in new moods, and with an impartiality 
which is hardly possible when our discovery is quite 
fresh. It sometimes happens that what satisfies us 
perfectly on a bright wholesome morning in early 
autumn, looks very much less satisfactory on a io^'gy 
chilly day six weeks later. Or we find on reflection 
that some elements of the problem which ought to 
have been taken into account have been overlooked, 
and that our theory requires some slight modification ; 
or that we had not quite seen all the relations between 
the new doctrine and other provinces of truth with 
which we had been long familiar, and that the lines 
defining the new territory have to be shifted here and 
there, and redrawn, in order to prevent encroachment 
on established rights. 

There are other reasons for delay. In the first 
moment of discovery there is a certain intellectual 
exultation and pride on account of our achievement. 
We are apt at such a time to give ourselves airs, as 
though we too could now claim rank among original 
thinkers and among the reformers of theological 
science. We shall do well to give ourselves time to 
cool, and to recover our humility and modesty by 
remembering the vast and boundless regions which 
still lie beyond the limits of our thought. It is well 
to be cautious. Vauvenargues warns us that when 
we take the trouble to work out what strikes us as a 



LECT. I.] THEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES. iS 

profound discovery, we sometimes find that it is a 
truth known to every man we meet in the streets ; ^ 
and sometimes what a young theologian receives with 
trembhng wonder as a revelation fresh from heaven, 
never known before to scholar or saint, turns out to 
be one of those familiar elements of faith which every 
devout old lady in his congregation has known for 
years. 

There is still another reason for delay when we 
think we have a grasp of new truth. We shall not be 
able at once to do justice to our new discovery. At 
first we shall not handle it firmly and with any free- 
dom. The kind of mastery over a doctrine which is 
absolutely necessary to effective exposition can only 
come when by repeated and prolonged meditation 
we have made it perfectly familiar to us. Let me 
recommend you, therefore, to build up your theology 
in private, and not to perplex your congregations with 
speculations which are only half finished, with theories 
which are in process of formation. Let the walls of 
the building be dry before you ask people to come 
and live in it. Even when you think you have made 
sure of a new truth, or have constructed a more com- 
plete and philosophical exposition of a truth already 
acknowledged, do not be in a hurry to preach it. There 
is no need for being in a hurry. Do not be afraid that 
some one will get out a patent before you. The world 

^ " Lorsqu'une pensee s'offre a nous comme une profonde 
decouverte, et que nous prenons la peine de la developper? 
nous trouvons souvent que c'est une verite qui court les rues." — 
"Reflexions et Maximes. 



i6 PREACHING NEGATIONS. [lect. i. 



can wait for your discovery a week or two longer after 
waiting for it through so many centuries ; and perhaps 
the delay of even a few months will do mankind no 
great harm. 

While the process of reconstructing your own theo- 
logy is going on, you will be tempted to criticise with 
unsparing severity the traditional theology of evan- 
gelical Churches. Some of you will find that the 
temptation will be very strong. When a young man 
begins to preach, if he has any fervour in him, any 
enterprise, any intellectual brightness or freedom, he 
is very likely to think that the changes which are 
necessary in the thought of the Church are almost 
infinite. 

" Of old things all are over old, 
Of good things none are good enough, 
He'll show that he can help to frame 
A Church of better stuff." ^ 

There are false conceptions of God, and of the ways 
of God to men ; false conceptions of duty, and of the 
ideal of the Christian character. Doctrines which he 
supposes are commonly accepted seem to him illogi- 
cal, unphilosophical, perhaps immoral, perhaps gro- 
tesque, perhaps blasphemous. Rules of life having 
wide authority, and regarded with ancient reverence, 
seem miserably artificial. What can he do.!* He does 
not know very much more than other people about 
positive truth. If it occurred to him to write down 
the truths of which he has made sure, and about which 

^ Wordsworth : " Rob Roy's Grave." I have taken some 
liberties with the original. 



LECT. I.] PREACHING NEGATIONS. " 17 

ordinary Christian people are either ignorant or mis- 
taken, he would not want many sheets of foolscap to 
record them all. About how the facts really stand in 
relation to many great questions he is very uncertain : 
he is searching for truth, and in many directions he 
knows that he has not found it. He is acquainted 
with a great many speculations which have broken 
down, but as to the real truth about the subjects which 
these speculations were intended to illustrate and 
explain, he has not made up his mind. 

But if he is not clear as to the right solution of 
many large and vital controversies, he is perfectly 
clear that the people about him have received by 
tradition very wrong solutions ; and so he attempts to 
set them right. And yet this is hardly an accurate ac- 
count of the matter : he shows them that they are 
wrong at present ; but setting them right is a very 
different business. He smites the errors of the Church 
a little harder perhaps than the errors of the world. 
He thinks that in this way he shall get some 
sympathy for the Christian faith from those who have 
hitherto rejected it. He repeats in another form the 
mistake which is committed by politicians when 
they deliver speeches which are more loudly cheered by 
their opponents than by their own party. Politically, 
that style of speaking does not prove in the long run to 
have been very sagacious. It is much easier to lose 
friends than to gain opponents. The young preachers 
I am thinking of find this out in time. Meanwhile they 
go on confuting the errors of old-fashioned Christian 

3 ' 



i8 PREACHING NEGATIONS. [lect. i. 

people, and chaffing them fortheir narrowness and want 
of enlightenment. It is a delightfully easy occupation, 
and very exhilarating. It takes nothing out of a 
man. It is play, not work. Yet while a man is doing 
it he seems to be getting on wonderfully fast, and to 
be accomplishing amazing reforms. 

Churches must bear with all this as patiently as they 
can, if the young preacher is right at heart, if it is clear 
that, with some intellectual waywardness and uncer- 
tainty, he really grasps the central truths of the Chris- 
tian faith, and that notwithstanding some conceit he 
really wants to glorify God, and has only made a 
mistake about the best way to do it. He will find out 
his blunder in a few years. He will discover that, 
while perhaps he has been cutting up many weeds, he 
has planted very few trees and sown very little corn ; so 
that as autumn after autumn goes by, there is not much 
fruit ripening in the orchard and there is hardly any 
crop in the fields. He will discover that it is one thing 
to show men that they are in the wrong, and to leave 
them there — another thing to show them how to get 
right. He w^ill ask himself, not how many errors he can 
confute, but how much positive truth he has to teach. 

Gentlemen, would it not be well to ask yourselves 
that question before you enter the ministry } Before you 
begin, to teach others, is it not desirable that you should 
know something yourselves } " We believe and there- 
fore speak," has been the device of the true ministers 
of the Church from apostolic times to our own. 
Judging from many sermons which are preached in 



LECT. I. ] WBA T DO YOU BELIE VE ? 19 

our day, there are ministers who have taken a new 
motto — " We disbelieve and therefore speak." But 
what results can come from a ministry which is almost 
wholly critical and destructive ? What nobleness of 
moral character can it build up ? What moral strength 
can it inspire ? What ardour can it kindle ? What 
lofty hopes can it confirm ? What broken heart can it 
bind up ? To what weariness can it give rest ? What 
defence can it offer to the tempted ? What relief from 
the consciousness of guilt to the penitent ? What 
guidance to the soul that is athirst for the living God ? 
Have you anything to tell men that will make 
heaven seem nearer to earth than it ever was before, 
that will compel them to feel the tragic grandeur of 
humian life and the infinite contrast between righteous- 
ness and sin ? Have you anything to tell them which 
will save them from the bitterness of despair in their 
worst sorrows, and which will keep them calm and 
enable them to exercise self-restraint in their greatest 
successes and triumphs ? Have ycu anything to tell 
them that, in the fiercest heat of youthful passion, under 
the severest strain of business and professional anxiety, 
and when the cold selfishness of old age is creeping 
upon them, will enable them to master the world, the 
flesh, and the devil ? You are to be ministers of Christ 
— have you anything to say that ought to make the 
authority of Christ more awful and august to the con- 
science and the will, and the mercy of Christ more 
tender to the heart, of every man that listens to you ? 
If not, then, whatever comes of it, refuse to be a can- 

3* 



20 THINK OF YOUR CONGREGATION. [lect. i. 

didate for a pulpit, refuse to accept the pastorate of a 
Church. Go down to New York, and work in the 
docks, or to Chicago, and get employment in the lum- 
ber trade ; go out west and cultivate a farm, edit a 
newspaper, turn lawyer, become a clerk in a store or a 
hired waiter in an hotel ; do anything to earn an honest 
living, but in God's name do not become a minister. 

I have warned you against the mistake of those 
preachers who carry on in their sermons the intellec- 
tual labour of building up their own scientific theology, 
and of the mistake of those preachers who pass their 
time in the pulpit in the intellectual amusement of 
destroying the theological creed of other people. It 
is possible to avoid both these mistakes, and yet to 
miss the true end of preaching. While you are at 
the university you ought to be possessed with an 
ardent enthusiasm for intellectual pursuits, and it 
will be a great calamity if that enthusiasm is ex- 
tinguished when you enter upon your ministry ; but 
if you are to preach to any purpose you must care 
more for men than for learning and literature. There 
are some ministers who think so much about their 
sermons that they never seem to think about their 
congregations. They have so intense an intellectual 
delight in the exposition and defence of religious 
truth, that they do not remember that their business 
is to teach, to impress, to convert the living men and 
women that listen to them. If this does not happen 
often, it may be regarded as a venial oftence. I do 
not think that any man preaches well whose purely in- 



LECT. I.] THINK OF YOUR congregation: 21 

tellectual interest in his work is not keen and strong. 
When the intellectual excitement of the preacher is 
passionate, it becomes contagious ; the people catch 
it, and follow him from point to point with eager sym- 
pathy and interest. 

In establishing the true sense of a perplexed pas- 
sage of Holy Scripture by which many commentators 
have been baffled, in constructing a philosophical 
defence of some fundamental article of the Christian 
faith, in elaborating an exact definition of a great 
doctrine, in developing a theological theory, in destroy- 
ing some ingenious and popular objection to the trust- 
worthiness of revelation, in analysing the subtleties of 
some form of Christian experience, in discussing an 
important question of Christian ethics, it will do no 
harm if now and then we are so mastered by intellec- 
tual excitement as to forget the people to whom we 
are preaching. Occasionally it may do a congrega- 
tion good to have their logical faculties strained to the 
utmost limits of endurance, like the muscles of a 
horse in a great race, and their whole intellectual life 
stirred to its very depths, by the defence, the demon- 
stration, or the exposition of a great truth. 

But never to think of the people to whom we have 
to speak, to forget them always, to preach Sunday 
after Sunday without any sympathy with their sorrows 
and disappointments, their happiness, their hopes, 
their struggles with temptation, their failures and their 
triumphs ; to preach as though we were not of the 
same flesh and blood as our hearers, to permit our 



22 AIMLESS SERMONS. [lect. i. 

whole interest to be absorbed in the investigations of 
scholars and the controversies of theologians, to care 
less for the righteousness and the religious strength 
and joy of our congregations than for the beauty and 
depth of our thought, the grace and vigour of our style 
— this is treachery both to the Church and to Christ. 

A year or two ago I heard two sermons while I was 
at the sea for my summer holiday. The preacher was 
a cultivated man, with an active, intelligent mind, and 
genuine religious faith. The prayers which he offered 
were true prayers, and would have made the service 
worth attending, had there been no preaching at all. 
The sermons were, of their kind, exceptionally good. 
The exegesis was sound and scholarly ; the thought 
was ingenious and fresh ; the illustrations were ad- 
mirable ; the style had only one fault — it was at times 
too delicately beautiful. But it did not seem to occur 
to the preacher that there was anybody listening to 
him. The sermons seemed to have been written 
simply because he found it pleasant to think and to 
write about the two texts which suggested them. I 
could not make out what truth he wanted to make 
clearer to us ; or what neglected duty he wished us to 
discharge ; or what devout affection he intended to 
quicken ; or even what error he intended to expose. 

Perhaps it may be said that sermons of this kind fall 
in with the mood and the habits of people who are away 
from home for rest. All the week long they are lying 
on the sands, listening to the dreamy music of the rising 
or the falling tide, and watching the changing lights 



LECT I.] AIMLESS SERMONS. 23 

on the sea ; or they are wandering without any definite 
purpose over the hills ; or reading idle books in shady 
glens ; and on Sundays they are hardly prepared to 
listen to strenuous preaching. A quiet, thoughtful, 
devout meditation, with no particular object in it, is all 
they care for ; and I admit that such sermons may be 
a pleasant change both to ministers and congregations, 
even when they are at home. I am afraid, however, 
that they are preached too often. 

It seems hardly courteous, to say the least, to keep 
people listening to you for half-an-hour without con- 
sidering whether what you are saying is likely to 
interest them or not. Congregations soon discover 
that their presence is not recognised by the minister, 
and they will leave him to do as well as he can without 
them. If a minister forgets that he has to preach to 
a congregation, the chances are that he will soon have 
no congregation to preach to. 

Alexander Vinet reminds us that " preaching is an 
action." ^ A true sermon is meant to do something. 
It is not intended to be listened to merely. It fails 
of its purpose unless its makes some truth clearer, or 
more vivid, or more certain to those who hear it ; or 
unless it explains and enforces some duty ; or unless it 
strengthens some Christian affection ; or brings solace 
to trouble, or courage to despondency. On Sunday 
evening, as we walked backwards and forwards on the 
sands, I ventured to tell my friend, whose sermons I 
have described, that it would do him a world of good 
^ " Pastoral Theology" (Clark's translation), p. 173. 



24 AIMLESS SERMONS. [lect. i. 

to make twenty or thirty speeches at ward meetings, 
held night after night, in a hot municipal contest. If 
he had to persuade discontented ratepayers that the 
School Board had not spent too much on the school 
buildings, or paid the masters and mistresses too well ; 
or if he had to convince them that it would be worth 
their while to have the streets better paved, better 
swept, and better lighted ; that the health of the town 
would be improved if the corporation spent more 
money in removing nuisances ; that a scheme for a 
new street would soon repay the capital spent upon 
it ; if he had to expose the misrepresentations, cor- 
rect the figures, demonstrate the groundlessness of the 
fears of the hostile party, and so to carry the vote and 
fire the zeal of meeting after meeting for his own can- 
didate ; I thought that he might learn some lessons 
about preaching worth knowing. " To carry the vote 
and fire the zeal " of our congregations — this, gentle- 
men, is our true business. If we are to be successful 
there must be vigorous intellectual activity, but it must 
be directed by a definite intention to produce a definite 
result Our intellectual activity must be of the nature 
of work — not merely of the nature of pleasant and 
healthy exercise. There must be patient instruction, 
solid argument, earnest appeal, declamation if you 
please ; but we must know what we mean to do, and 
we must put out our whole strength to get it done. 
We shall preach to no purpose unless we have a pur- 
pose in preaching. Archbishop Whately said of some 
preacher that " he aimed at nothing, and hit it." 



LECT. I.] MELODRAMATIC SERMONS. 25 

But preaching may seem to be very effective, may 
attract great crowds, may produce intense excitement, 
may win for the preacher a wide reputation, and may 
yet be practically worthless and even mischievous. 
We cannot altogether escape the spirit of our times^ 
When sensuous poetry is corrupting the public taste ; 
when coarse, sensational fiction is popular, not only 
among half-educated boys and girls, but among wo- 
men who claim to have cultivation and refinement ; 
it is only natural that we should be in danger of 
adopting a melodramatic and hysterical kind of preach- 
ing, which stimulates the passions, but conveys no 
solid instruction and produces no wholesome moral 
or religious results. 

I believe in the duty of consecrating to the exposi- 
tion and defence of Divine truth every faculty and 
resource which the preacher may happen to possess. 
There is no power of the intellect, no passion of the 
heart, no learning, no natural genius, that should not 
be compelled to take part in this noble service. The 
severest and keenest logic, the most exuberant fancy, 
the boldest imagination, shrewdness, wit, pathos, in- 
dignation, sternness, may all contribute to the illustra- 
tion of human duty and of the authority and love of 
God. If the heavens declare God's glory, if fire and 
hail, snow and vapour, and the stormy wind fulfil His 
word, if all His works praise Him, then the loftiest 
heights of intellectual majesty, the most dazzling intel- 
lectual splendours, every brilliant constellation in the 
firmament of genius, the lightnings and tempests of 



26 MELODRAMATIC PREACHING. [lect. i. 

noble and eloquent passion, may also praise the Lord 
and show forth His excellent greatness. 

But the mere sensational preacher cannot shelter 
himself under any such plea as this. He is always 
straining for excitement ; he cares nothing about the 
means by which he produces it. Even if he has true 
genius his preaching is a peril to the souls of men. 
Dramatic power in the pulpit as well as on the platform 
or the stage may move to laughter or tears ; impas- 
sioned rhetoric, when used by the religious orator as 
well as by the politician, may lash the most sluggish 
nature into vehement agitation ; and a sermon, by the 
native force of the preacher, may produce an effect 
upon the emotions which may be mistaken for peni- 
tence, adoration, or faith. But if the effect which we 
produce is not produced by the clearness and energy 
and earnestness with which we illustrate the very 
truth of God, we shall save neither ourselves nor 
them that hear us. Most commonly the men who are 
tempted to preach in this style are mere charlatans. 
They have neither the fire of human genius nor the 
fire of a Divine zeal. They win a transient popularity, 
but they inspire no intellectual respect, they command 
no lasting confidence ; their popularity is a shame to 
the Church, and contributes nothing to the final 
triumphs of the kingdom of God. I entreat you to 
refuse to purchase a temporary and worthless popu- 
larity by means so base. Preaching of this kind is a 
prostitution of the true dignity of the pulpit and a 
desecration of the gospel of Christ. 



LECTURE IL 

THE INTELLECT IN RELATION TO PREACHING. 

GENTLEMEN, — It is my impression that some 
men of considerable intellectual resources and 
of genuine religious earnestness fail in the ministry 
and fail especially as preachers, through falling into 
habits which make them incapable of hard work. 
Indolence is a vice of which, perhaps, Americans are 
less likely to be guilty than Englishmen. There seems 
to be something in your climate, or in your national 
manners, or in the mgdification of your temperament 
since you cam.e across the sea, which makes you alert, 
restless, and eager : among you the Anglo-Saxon slug- 
gishness seems to have disappeared. But perhaps it 
will be wise not to be too sure of yourselves. 

Are there no American ministers who were men of 
brilliant promise at the university, but who are most in- 
efficient preachers ? — none whom their friends describe 
as " unfulfilled prophecies " .'' Some men fail because 
they lose their spiritual earnestness ; but others fail 
because in the course of a few years after they become 
pastors their intellectual force seems spent and their 
intellectual fire extinguished. Their sermons show 
no sign of elasticity and freshness of thought. The 



28 LEARNED SERMONS. [lect. il 

muscles of their mind have degenerated. If a 
preacher is to be effective — permanently effective — 
he must form and maintain habits of regular and 
strenuous intellectual activity, and he must exert his 
utmost intellectual strength in his sermons. 

I do not mean that you should fill your sermons 
with antiquarian and historical and geographical 
learning. To do this may be sheer intellectual in- 
dolence. With the Bible Dictionaries and the books 
on the Geography and History of the Holy Land 
which are now accessible to us, a great show of 
learning may be made at the cost of a very little 
trouble. Even if hard work has been necessary to 
get the information together, no intellectual effort is 
required to transfer it from your note-book to your 
sermons. There are men who, if they are preaching 
on the Book of Exodus, will give you on one Sunday 
morning an elaborate account of the political and 
religious institutions of ancient Egypt. On the next 
they will confute the hypothesis that the pyramids 
near Cairo were built by the Jews during the evil 
times which followed the death of Joseph ; perhaps 
they will describe the structure of the pyramids, and 
discuss the theory of Mr. Piazzi Smith as to the 
purpose for which they were erected ; and they will 
be certain to say something about the probable sites 
of Pharaoh's "treasure cities — Pithom.and Raamses." 
The Jews and their miseries will in all probability be 
quite forgotten, and no poor fellow in the congregation 
whose fortunes are ruined and whose heart is almost 



LECT. II.] LEARNED SERMONS. 29 

broken through the villainy of men whom he has 
trusted, or through the hardness and injustice of the 
men he is obliged to serve, will go home comforted 
because he has been reminded that God saw the 
affliction of His people in Egypt, and heard their 
cry, and knew their sorrows, and wrought great mir- 
acles for their deliverance. The next Sunday, when 
discoursing about the plagues, these preachers will 
say very little about the tragic interest of the con- 
flict between the haughty king and the God whom 
he defied, about that persistent refusal to submit 
to God's authority which, in our own days and 
among ourselves, as in the days of Pharaoh, issues at 
last in a hardness of heart which makes repentance 
and salvation impossible ; but they will speak learnedly 
about the natural history of Egypt, and about the 
natural phenomena of which the plagues were perhaps 
only the exceptional aggravation. 

Even if they are preaching on the Gospels they 
will make no intellectual effort to bring vividly before 
you the Son of God in His living relations to the men 
and women that saw His face and heard His voice, 
and brought their children to Him to be healed of all 
kinds of diseases ; but they will lazily repeat what 
they have read in Kitto, or Robinson, or Dean Stanley, 
or their Bible Encyclopaedia, about the blue of Syrian 
skies, about the fertility of the plain of Gennesareth, 
about the range of limestone hills which form the 
backbone of Palestine, about the structure of Eastern 
houses, the family of Herod, the political condition of 



30 '' INTELLECTUAL SERMONS. [lect. ii. 

Judaea and Galilee in the time of Christ, and the reli- 
gious opinions of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Ser- 
mons of this sort are not at all of the kind that I am 
thinking of when I say that in your sermons you 
should exert your utmost intellectual strength. Such 
sermons as these may be written in your most indolent 
moods ; you may write them on a hot summer's evening, 
when you are worn out with your year's work, and 
are longing for a holiday among the mountains or at 
the sea. 

Nor am I asking you to try to preach what in Eng- 
land we are accustomed to call " intellectual " sermons. 
Some preachers are always " intellectual " and always 
cold. Their minds are never heated, even by the 
rapidity of their own movement. They seem incap- 
able of passion, — even of what may be called intel- 
lectual passion. They put no more thought into their 
sermons than other men who have more fire ; but 
because the thought is there and not the fire, they 
suppose that they are more " thoughtful " than their 
brethren. It would be just as reasonable to suppose 
that a skeleton in a surgeon's cupboard has more bones 
than a living man. The living man has quite as many 
bones as the skeleton ; and besides the bones he has 
flesh and muscle ; an eye that may be filled with sun- 
shine or with tears ; a voice that can command, or 
entreat, or comfort ; a hand that can help or strike. 
The preachers that I am thinking of are satisfied with 
the " bones." When they have their " thought " they 
care for nothing more. 



LECT. II.] ''INTELLECTUAL'' SERMOXS. 31 

You do not suppose that because Burke's " French 
Revolution " is full of imagination, fancy, and fervour, 
there is less " thought " in it than in some essay on 
the Theory of Rent, which is hard logic from end to 
end ; or that there is less " thought " in Shakespeare's 
" Tempest " and " King Lear " than in some dry and 
dreary dissertation on the doctrine of the Absolute. 
Burke and Shakespeare have as mmch " thought " as 
the political economist or the metaphysician, but the 
" thought " has flesh as well as bones, and is inspired 
by passion and imagination with a glorious life. 

Your " intellectual " preachers are for the most part 
men who are destitute of some of the brightest and 
loftiest forms of intellectual power, or in whom they 
have been suppressed. These men may have worked 
hard in the forest, the quarry, and the mine; they 
may have prepared precious marbles, and silver ore, 
and gold of Ophir, and cedar trees and fir trees from 
Lebanon, for the house of their God ; but the timber 
remains in rough logs, and the miarble lies unpolished, 
and the costly metal has not been shaped into beau- 
tiful forms by the cunning hand of the artist. Why do 
they not finish their work } Is it because they are 
indolent ? or is it because they have a false idea of 
what preaching ought to be } Or is it because 
they are mere quarrymen, and are destitute of the 
genius of the sculptor and the architect ; have the 
strength to work hard at the gold diggings, but 
are incapable of masterirg the art of the goldsmith } 
The intellectual activity which I ask for is the 



32 ELOQUENCE MUST BE ATTRACTIVE, [lect. ii. 

activity of all the various powers of your intellectual 
nature. 

" Eloquence must be attractive," says Mr. Emerson. 
" The virtue of books is to be readable, and of orators 
to be interesting." He adds — and perhaps he is right 
— that " this is a gift of nature." \ But there are men 
that have the " gift " who never use it in the pulpit. 
Let them speak at a political meeting, or, indeed, at 
a meeting of any kind, and their speeches are bright 
with fancy and warm with generous excitement ; 
memory, wit, imagination, are all alert and active ; 
they make the most felicitous quotations from ancient 
and modern poets ; they remember wise and noble 
sentences in Plato, in Hooker, in Jeremy Taylor, in 
Pascal ; they are familiar with Sir Walter Scott and 
with Nathaniel Hawthorne and with Charles Dickens ; 
they have a humorous tale to tell which they have 
met with in some book of travels ; or they remind you 
of a pathetic story which you saw in the newspaper 
the day before ; or they have an adventure of their 
own to describe, and you are moved to laughter or 
tears. But let them once begin to preach, and every- 
thing is changed. One might almost imagine that 
between the vestry and the pulpit they had seen the 
sable throne of the goddess of the " Dunciad," — 

" Before herj Fancy's gilded clouds decay, 
And all its varying rainbows die away. 
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, 
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. . 

^ '• Society and Solitude." English reprint, p. 59. 



LECT. II.] THE GODDESS OF DULNESS, 33 

As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, 
The sickening stars fade off th' ethereal plain ; 
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand opprest, 
Closed one by one to everlasting rest ; 
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might, 
Art after art goes out, and all is night." 

Or if it is hardly fair to say that the presence of the 
drowsy goddess sinks their whole intellectual life into 
slumber, this at least must be acknowledged, that 
three-fourths of their powers are in a condition of sus- 
pended animation from the moment they announce 
their text till the sermon is finished. At the very best 
there is an unnatural strain on the faculties which re- 
tain their activity, and which are compelled to do all 
the work — a strain which is felt by the preacher, and 
is felt still more by those members of the congregation 
who conscientiously endeavour to hear the sermon 
through. The same muscles are on the stretch all the 
time. 

We ought to remember that for an ordinary speaker 
to excite and maintain the interest of his audience it 
is indispensable that he should appeal to various sus- 
ceptibilities of emotion and bring into play various 
intellectual powers. Monotony is almost always fatal 
to interest ; monotony of voice, monotony of style, 
monotony of intellectual activity. No doubt there 
have been great preachers whose names may be quoted 
against me. They achieved all their success by the 
manly breadth and strenuous vigour of their logic, or 
by the terrible vehemence with which they were able 
to denounce sin, or by their pathos, or by their imagi- 

4 



34 MONOTONY FATAL TO INTEREST. [lect. ii. 

native fire, or by the keenness of their moral penetra- 
tion. There was no variety of power ; but the soHtary 
power they had was of transcendent force, and great 
congregations hste'ned to them without weariness. 
Such examples, however, count for nothing. These 
were extraordinary men ; we are not. The chances 
are that we have no single faculty in such consum- 
mate vigour and perfection that we can rely on it for 
everything. We ought to take it for granted that we 
must use every resource we have, in order to be 
effective or even interesting. 

Mr. Emerson's words are worth quoting again : " It 
is the virtue of orators to be interesting." I doubt 
whether preachers have any right to complain if 
people who used to come to church regularly get into 
the habit of staying away. If we were " interesting," 
they would find it pleasanter to listen to our sermons 
than to spend the morning at home, writing letters or 
reading the newspapers. I am sure that \ve have no 
right to complain if while we are preaching people 
go to sleep. It is our duty to keep them awake. 
Nor have we any right to complain that while they 
seem to be listening to us they are thinking of their 
farm, or their store, or the new flower they have got 
for their green-house, or the new horse they have 
bought for their carriage. If I were speaking to a 
congregation instead of to a class of students pre- 
paring for the ministry, I should, perhaps, tell them 
that they ought to make an effort to fixT their minds 
on the sermon, and that they ought to drive away 



LECT. II.] MR. GEORGE DAWSON'S MAXIM. 35 

all thoughts that would distract their attention ; but 
as I am speaking to yoit, I am bound to maintain 
that it is your business to make your sermons so 
interesting, that the people, so far from having to 
make an effort to think of what you are saying to 
them, shall have to make an effort to think of any- 
thing else. 

Some of you, perhaps, had the good fortune to hear 
the late Mr. George Dawson lecture or preach when 
he was visiting the States, a year or two before his 
death. He was a speaker who charmed and delighted 
all kinds of audiences — literary men and farm- 
labourers, merchants and mechanics. He once said 
to me, " When I speak I make up my mind that the 
people shall listen to me : if they don't listen, it 
doesn't matter zvJiat you say." That is a maxim which 
it will be worth our while to remember, especially if 
we complete it by adding that "if the people do 
listen, what you say matters a great deal." The 
maxim is obvious enough, and yet there are preachers 
to whom it never seems to have occurred. 

Perhaps I may be warned that if the kind of advice 
which I am giving you just now is followed, it will be 
likely to lower the dignity of the pulpit. Gentlemen, 
I decline to believe that dulness is necessary to dignity. 
The dignity of the pulpit is derived from the grandeur 
and glory of the truths which the preacher has to 
illustrate, and from the solemnity of the duties which 
he has to enforce ; from the infinite issues which de- 
pend upon the manner in which the truths are re- 

4* 



36 THE DIGNITY OF THE PULPIT. [lect. ii. 

ceived and the duties discharged by the people that 
listen to him ; from the interest of God Himself in 
the varying fortunes of the conflict which the preacher 
is maintaining with the atheism, the irreligion, the 
evil practices, and the moral indifference" of mankind ; 
from the mysterious and supernatural forces which 
are in alliance with the preacher in this tremendous 
and protracted conflict — for while the preacher is 
speaking there is another voice than his appealing to 
the hearts and consciences of men, the voice of the 
Divine Spirit ; and there is the invisible presence of 
Him who, when He charged His apostles to teach all 
nations what He had commanded them, declared that 
while they were fulfilling their commission He would 
be with them always, even to the end of the world. 
In an inferior degree the dignity of the pulpit is de- 
rived from the intellectual force and culture of the 
preacher, from his moral qualities, and from his per- 
sonal sanctity ; from his courage, his gentleness, his 
zeal, and from the earnestness and energy with which 
he uses all his powers to secure the triumph of right- 
eousness, and the rescue of the human race from its 
sorrows and its sins. If there is any dignity derived 
from dulness, I care nothing for it. Dignity which is 
purchased at the expense of efficiency is dignity of 
a false and artificial kind. And, to return to the point 
from which I have wandered, we cannot be efficient if 
we are not interesting ; nor can we be interesting if 
we suppress all those intellectual faculties which would 
give brightness, colour, variety, and animation to our 



LECT. II.] POWER OF STATEMENT. 37 

preaching. Nor is it merely for the sake of stimulat- 
ing and sustaining the interest of the people that I ask 
you to use, in the pulpit, all the intellectual powers 
you possess, and to take care that by your private 
reading these powers are kept in vigorous health and 
activity. You need them all if you are to preach 
efficiently. 

Take what may be regarded by inconsiderate persons 
as the easiest part of our work — the mere statement and 
exposition of religious truth. It may be supposed that 
any one who has mastered a truth will be able to 
make it clear to other people. But a moment's re- 
flection will convince you that this is a mistake. Is a 
man able to tell a story clearly and accurately merely 
because he knows all the facts } It often requires all 
the ingenuity and patience of a skilful barrister to 
draw out of a friendly witness an intelligible account 
of what the witness saw with his own eyes, heard with 
his own ears, and perfectly remembers. Mr. Huxley — 
you will forgive me, I am sure, for taking my illustra- 
tions from the other side of the Atlantic ; I have too 
limited an acquaintance with distinguished Americans 
to enable me to appeal with any confidence in my 
accuracy to the names with which you are most fami- 
liar, and which would occur most naturally to an Ame- 
rican minister occupying this chair — Mr. Huxley has, 
no doubt, immense scientific knowledge, and is also 
eminent as a keen and original observer of scientific 
phenomena, but he owes his distinction, partly, to his 
rare powers of exposition. To listen to one of his 



38 MR. GLADSTONE'S BUDGET SPEECHES, [lect. ii. 

popular lectures is a lesson in rhetoric. Mr. Gladstone 
has an extraordinary genius for finance, but his power 
of making a financial statement is, perhaps, equally 
extraordinary. When he was Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer his budget speech was always one of the 
great oratorical triumphs of the session. He often 
spoke for three hours, and the House of Commons was 
under a spell all the time. Of course, before our 
tariff was simplified by Mr. Gladstone's policy, the 
budget speech always excited a curiosity and interest 
of which the dullest Chancellor was able to avail 
himself. Every one wanted to know whether the ex- 
penditure for the year was to be provided for by 
loading the income tax with an additional penny, or 
whether the Chancellor was sufficiently well satisfied 
with what we became accustomed to call the natural 
expansion of other sources of revenue to take a penny 
off. Tea merchants and grocers were eager to learn 
whether the duty on tea was to be kept up ; coffee 
merchants, whether the duty on cofi'ee was to be 
lowered ; sugar refiners, whether the sugar duties 
were to be touched ; farmers, whether the Govern- 
ment was disposed to make any concessions to them 
in the matter of the malt tax. It required very little 
skill so to arrange the successive disclosures of the 
intentions of the Government as to keep the attention 
of the House active and av/ake to the very end of a 
long speech. But Mr. Gladstone used to develop his 
financial proposals with all the art with which a skil- 
ful novelist develops his plot. There were alternations 



LECT. II. ] MR. GLADSTONE'S BUDGET SPEECHES.. 39 

of hope and fear. At the very moment when you 
expected that your eager curiosity would be satisfied, 
and that you would hear how everything was going to 
turn out, some new complication arose, of exciting 
interest, and you began to suspect that you were only 
half through the second volume of the story, instead 
of being at the end of the third. It was not merely 
in the way in which he kept all the commercial 
" interests " on the stretch that he showed his power. 
The statement of the revenue and expenditure for the 
past year had appeared in the morning newspapers, 
but when he went through the statement at night, 
and explained it to the House, the figures which you 
had seen a few hours before, printed in black ink, were 
full of life and light. 

It was very wonderful, and showed what may be 
done by the power of skilful exposition, by an ingenious 
arrangement of topics, by stimulating curiosity before 
satisfying it, by making everything clear as you go 
along, and yet taking care not to exhaust the interest of 
your audience prematurely, A dull Chancellor, with the 
same materials before him, would have gone through 
the points in his " notes " just as they happened to 
come ; would have given the explanation furnished by 
one of his subordinates of how it was that the customs 
or the excise exceeded or fell short of the calculations 
he had submitted twelve months before ; would have 
reminded the House in a dreary way of the unexpected 
circumstances which had rendered necessary a larger 
expenditure on the army or the navy than had been 



40 A DULL CHANCELLOl^S SPEECHES, [lect. ii. 

provided for in the estimates for the preceding year; 
and would then have stated in a few brief sentences 
what taxes and duties he proposed to increase or to 
diminish. But a statement like this, though it might 
contain the whole substance of one of Mr. Gladstone's 
great speeches; might just as well be printed as spoken. 
It would require an intellectual effort to master the 
details. When they were mastered they would soon 
be forgotten. It was the merit of Mr. Gladstone's 
eloquence that it fascinated people to whom finance 
was intolerably dry and unattractive ; enabled them to 
understand, without any consciousness of painful in- 
tellectual exertion, details which in print would have 
had no meaning to them, and fixed the general finan- 
cial position of the country in their memory. 

It seems easy to tell others what we know ourselves, 
but this power of exposition is in reality a difficult one 
for most men to acquire. I do not know that I can say 
anything about the way to acquire it which will be of 
much service to you, and my present object is merely 
to insist on its importance and value. The root of 
the power, I believe, lies in honest intellectual habits. 
Be sure that you know what you think you know. 
Instead of yielding too much to the passion for making 
your way into fresh and untravelled provinces of truth, 
make yourselves perfectly familiar with the truth you 
know already. Do not imagine that you know any- 
thing because you have a convenient formula in which 
you can express it. Get at the facts which lie behind 
the formula, and live among them. 



LECT. II.] HONEST INTELLECTUAL HABITS, 41 

Every subject on which we intend to speak should 
be in our complete possession as a whole, and not 
merely in its various parts. We must form the habit 
of keepingsuspended before our own mind all that we 
have to say. I mean that we must not be satisfied 
with thinking in succession of the successive points 
which we intend to touch ; we must get the power of 
seeing all the points at once, and in this way we shall 
become familiar with the relations between them. This 
habit and faculty may be strengthened by patient and 
honest reading. Before beginning a book it is well to 
look carefully through the table of contents, and to 
learn all that we can about the general design of the 
author, the method he has followed, the relations be- 
tween the various topics he has discussed, and the 
various arguments on which he has relied. After 
finishing the book we should repeat the process. We 
should look at the book as a whole, and piece together 
all its parts. When we are trying to master the 
geography of a country, we place vividly before our 
minds the mountains which run through it, and fix the 
watersheds : these determine the courses of the rivers. 
Then we picture to ourselves the outline of the coast. 
Then we distribute the mining districts. The physical 
features of the country suggest its natural political, 
boundaries. The navigable rivers, the harbours, the 
mines, determine the sites where the great towns are 
naturally built ; and these again determine the prin- 
cipal lines of communication, the roads, the canals, and 
the railways. It is in this way, and only in this way, 



42 SEIZING A SUBJECT AS A WHOLE. [lect. ii. 

that we can get a complete and organic conception of 
the geography of a country, and we must adopt a 
similar method if we are to get a complete and organic 
conception of the contents of a book. Everything 
worth reading with any care may be treated in this 
way; an epic poem as well as a philosophical discus- 
sion ; a tragedy as well as a theological argument ; an 
impassioned lyric as well as a sermon ; the story of 
a campaign as well as the decrees of a council and 
the articles of a confession of faith. If you acquire 
the power of grasping firmly and as a whole what 
other men have thought and written, you will find it 
far easier to grasp in the same way what you have 
thought and written yourselves ; and this intellectual 
mastery of a subject is necessary to the clear and 
effective exposition of it. 

That if you are to preach well you ought to keep 
your logical faculty bright and clear, is so obvious that 
I need hardly insist upon it. American preaching, I 
am told, is conspicuously argumentative. You " prove 
all things." But it may not be unnecessary to remind 
you that of all public speakers a preacher is most in 
danger of using arguments which prove nothing. He 
does not speak under the salutary restraints which 
compel other public men to consider whether there is 
any relation between their premises and their conclu- 
sions. There is no one to reply to him at the time, 
and the fear of the newspaper belonging to the other 
party is not before his eyes. This immunity from 
hostile discussion and criticism ought to lead us to 



LECT. IL] THE LOGICAL FACULTY, 43 

be the more careful and conscientious in making sure 
of the soundness of our reasoning ; and since we are 
deprived of the logical discipline which comes from 
fair and open debate with equal opponents, we should 
subject ourselves to discipline of another kind. 

The rules and exercises of formal logic are not 
without their value : to me they seem to afford an 
admirable method of intellectual training, and the 
contempt with which they are sometimes spoken of is 
extremely unwise and indefensible. But if you wish 
to invigorate your argumentative power, and to main- 
tain habits of logical accuracy, let me advise you to 
try your strength against the great writers in various 
departments of thought, theology, philosophy, politics. 
Master their method of proof Compel your mind 
to follow their reasoning step by step, and at every 
step make sure that the ground is firm. Beware of an 
indolent acquiescence in an argument on behalf of 
your own opinions. Keep your mind awake and 
active. Do not suffer yourselves to drift passively 
down the stream of any man's logic ; try whether the 
current is so strong that you cannot swim against it. 
Challenge every position maintained by your author. 
Test the strength of every link in his reasoning. Work 
of this kind will prevent your intellectual muscles 
from becoming flaccid. It will answer the purpose of 
practice with the foils : it will improve your " wind," 
give suppleness to your limbs, make your eye keen and 
your stroke sure. 

If you are to preach effectively you must also 



44 FANCY AND IMAGINATION. [lect. u. 

endeavour to keep your fancy fresh and your imagi- 
nation active. Every lecturer on preaching, every 
writer on rhetoric, insists on the importance of " illus- 
trations." They tell us that logic may lay the 
foundations and build the walls of the house, but 
that " illustrations " are the windows which let in the 
light. But I wish to remind you that if fancy is 
active and imagination vigorous, the walls will not 
merely be pierced with occasional windows — the walls 
themselves will be transparent, the light will come 
through everywhere. 

I do not mean, of course, that it is a merit for 
a sermon to be overlaid with ornament. Mere 
ornament, instead of making our meaning clearer, is 
likely to conceal it, just as architectural decoration 
sometimes conceals the true lines of a building. It 
is not of ornament I am thinking, but of the firm ard 
vigorous expression of our thought. All language 
representative of intellectual acts and moral qualities 
was created by the imagination, and every word that 
stands for a spiritual idea was at first a picture and a 
poem. The imaginative process, which in the earliest 
periods of human history transmuted the names of 
material things into the symbols of intellectual and 
spiritual attributes and activities, is going on per- 
petually. It is one of the distinctions of an original 
and powerful writer or speaker that his thoughts have 
sufficient life and vigour in them to form for them- 
selves, out of the common air and the common earth, a 
visible organisation — " a spiritual body " — of their own. 



LECT. II.] DE QUINCEY ON BURKE. 45 

De Quincey has some very striking observations on 
Edmund Burke which illustrate' my meaning. In 
reply to those critics who are accustomed to speak 
of the fancy of Burke, he says, with his customary 
scorn of opinions which he rejects : " Fancy in your 
throats, ye miserable twaddlers ! As if Edmund Burke 
was the man to play with his fancy for the purpose 
of separable ornament. He was a man of fancy in no 
other sense than as Lord Bacon was so, and Jeremy 
Taylor, i and as all large and discursive thinkers are 
and must be ; that is to say, the fancy which he had 
in common with all mankind, and very probably in no 
eminent degree, in him was urged into unusual 
activity under the necessities of his capacious under- 
standing. His great and peculiar distinction was 
that he viewed all objects of the understanding under 
more relations than other men, and under more com- 
plex relations. . . . Now to apprehend and detect more 
relations, or to pursue them steadily, is a process abso- 
lutely impossible without the intervention of physical 
analogies. To say, therefore, that a man is a great 
thinker, or define thinker [by which De Quincey has 
explained he means a subtle thinker], is but another 
expression for saying that he has a schematisiiig (or, 
to use a plainer, but less accurate expression, a 
figurative) understanding. In that sense, and for 

^ Not having the fear of De Ouincey's scorn to restrain me, 
I venture to say that the appeal to Jeremy Taylor seems 
unfortunate. Surely with him Fancy often usurped a place to 
which she had no claim, forgot that she was a subject, and 
reigned as a queen — a veritable Queen Mab of Fairyland. 



46 THINKING IN SYMBOLS, [lect. ii. 

that purpose, Burke is figurative ; but understood, as 
he has been understood by the long-eared race of his 
critics, not as thinking in and by his figures, but as 
deliberately laying them on by way of enamel or 
after - ornament — not as incarnating, but simply as 
dressing his thoughts in imagery — so understood, he 
is not the Burke of reality, but a poor, fictitious 
Burke, modelled after the poverty of conception which 
belongs to his critics." i 

You will observe that De Quincey says that 
Burke thought " in and by his figures." Imagination 
furnished him — not with mere jewellery for beauty 
and ornament — but with the very tools and instru- 
ments necessary to the process of thinking. In his 
case, according to De Quincey, the subtlety and 
originality of his thought imposed upon the imagina- 
tion this service. The concrete symbols had to be 
created which were necessary to make definite and 
visible to himself the movements of his intellectual 
activity, and to fix their results. In our case it is 
probable that the symbols already formed to our 
hand by the creative genius of other men will be 
found sufficient for the purposes of our private think- 
ing, and fancy will not be "urged into unusual 
activity under the necessities of a capacious under- 
standing." But there will be all the more reason for 
keeping it active by other means. We may be able 
to think accurately in abstract terms, but if we are 
to speak vigorously, our thoughts must take form and 

I De Quincey ; " Rhetoric." Works. Vol. x. pp. 56, 57. 



LECT. II.] VIVID AND LANGUID SPEAKING. 47 

colour, must clothe themselves in flesh and blood, so 
that they can be seen and handled by the people who 
are listening to us. It may not be necessary to be 
constantly creating new imagery and new forms of 
expression to convey our meaning ; if the common 
language of common men will serve our turn, we 
should use it. 

As I have said, every word that stands for a spiritual 
idea was at first a picture and a poem. In the case of 
most words of this class, the image stamped upon 
them by the fancy of the poet has worn away and 
become undistinguishable, like the impression on a 
coin which has been passing from hand to hand for 
a generation : — the colours have faded from the canvas, 
and have left vague and blurred outlines where 
there was once a picture. If your imagination is 
vigorous, you will so use these words as to restore to 
the worn coin the sharpness of the original impression, 
and to the canvas the brilliance and the richness of 
the original colouring. The difference between vivid 
and languid speaking depends very largely upon the 
extent to which the imagination contributes in this 
way to the expression of thought. The imaginative 
speaker instinctively rejects words, phrases, symbols, 
which are incapable of being animated with vital 
warmth. He rejects them as a tree rejects withered 
leaves and dead wood. His style is alive in every 
fibre of it. 

Imagination has another function which perhaps 
young preachers are in some danger of forgetting. In 



48 IMAGINATION AND PERSUASION. [lect. ii. 

the investigation of truth we are anxious to work in 
the dry Hght of the logical understanding. We make 
it a matter of conscience to give to every argument 
its just weight, and not more than its just weight ; to 
follow every line of evidence as far as it will legiti- 
mately lead us, and no farther. There is an intellectual 
integrity which to the scholar is everything that com- 
mercial integrity is to the merchant and judicial 
integrity to the judge. When men leave the univer- 
sity they are apt to suppose that the same laws which 
should govern the search for truth have authority in 
the propagation of it. They have a suspicion that 
their intellectual honesty will be compromised if they 
set an argument on fire with imagination and passion. 
But imagination is a most legitimate instrument of 
persuasion. It is an indispensable instrument. The 
minds of men are sometimes so sluggish that we can- 
not get them to listen to us unless our case is stated 
with a warmth and a vigour which the imagination 
alone can supply. There are many, again, who are 
not accessible to abstract argument, but who recognise 
truth at once when it assumes that concrete form with 
which imagination may invest it ; they cannot follow 
the successive steps of your demonstration, but they 
admit the truth of your proposition the moment 
you show them your diagram. Then, again, there 
are some truths — and these among the greatest — 
which rest, not upon abstract reasoning, but upon 
facts. Imagination must make the facts vivid and 
real. 



LECT. II.] IMAGINATION AKIN TO EMOTION. 49 

Further — in a country like this there are large num- 
bers of persons to whom it is unnecessary to offer any 
proof of the great articles of the Christian faith, 
although they are living in the habitual neglect of 
Christian duty. That there is a living God ; that He 
abhors sin and loves righteousness ; that the Lord 
Jesus Christ is the Son of God ; that He died for 
them, and that He will come again to judge the living 
and the dead, they believe. But these awful and 
glorious truths, though they have a place in the intel- 
lect, exert no influence on the heart, the conscience, 
and the will. They inspire no wonder ; they alarm no 
fear ; they kindle no hope ; they quicken no affection ; 
they fail even to excite the faintest moral interest. All 
life has gone out of them. But imagination is akin 
to emotion — much nearer akin than the logical under- 
standing — and in such cases imagination may do 
something to bridge the gulf between the speculative 
and the active powers ; may fulfil the office which 
Bolingbroke attributes to history, and " set passion on 
the side of judgment, and make the whole man of a 
piece." 

There are some verses in Mr. Tennyson's "In Memo- 
riam" which remind us of another reason why the 
Christian preacher, above all other public speakers, 
should cultivate this faculty. 

" Though truths in manhood darkly join 
Deep-seated in our mystic frame, 
We yield all blessing to the name 
Of Him that made them current coin. 

5 



50 THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION. [lect. ii. 



" For wisdom dealt with mortal powers, 
Where truth in closest words shall fail, 
When truth embodied iti a tale 
Shall enter in at lowly doors. 

" And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
With human hands the creed of creeds, 
In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought. 

" Which he may read that binds the sheaf, 
Or builds the house, or digs the grave, 
And those wild eyes that watch the wave 
In roarings round the coral reef." 

Nor is it merely at " lowly doors " that " truth em- 
bodied in a tale " finds easier entrance than truth 
which appears in the form of abstract propositions. 
God, who knows as we cannot know the mystery of 
our nature, has revealed Himself to mankind in a 
supernatural history. The revelation which we have 
to illustrate, and which furnishes the very substance 
of all our preaching, is not a series of theological 
dogmas or ethical principles ; it is in the main a 
record of how God has dealt with individual men, 
with nations, and with the human race. Above all, 
it is the story of the earthly life, the death, the resur- 
rection, and the ascension into heaven of our Lord 
Jesus Christ — God manifest in the flesh. 

What is commonly described as an historical imagi- 
nation, is indispensable to us if we are to form a right 
judgment on the historical contents of Holy Scrip- 
ture. " Our view of any transaction," says Arch- 
bishop Whately, "especially one that is remote in 



LECT. II.] IMAGINATION AND SCRIPTURE HISTORY. 51 

time or place, will necessarily be imperfect, generally 
incorrect, unless it embrace something more than the 
bare outline of the occurrences ; unless we have before 
the mind a lively idea of the scenes in which the 
events took place, the habits of thought and of feel- 
ing of the actors, and all the circumstances of the 
transaction ; unless, in short, we can in a considerable 
degree transport ourselves out of our own age and 
country and persons, and imagine ourselves the agents 
and spectators. . . . To say that imagination, if not 
regulated by sound judgment and sufficient know- 
ledge, may chance to convey to us false impressions 
of past events, is- only to say that man is fallible. But 
such false impressions are even much the inore likely 
to take possession of one whose imagination is feeble 
or uncultivated." ^ 

If the imaginative faculty is too sluggish to make 
the facts which are the vehicles of a large part of 
Divine revelation real and alive to us, we shall read 
two-thirds of the Old Testament and a third of the 
New with very languid interest ; we shall fail to dis- 
cover the truths and laws which the facts illustrate, 
and our hearts will remain untouched by the story. 
Even the epistles — and the epistles which are most 
exclusively doctrinal — will fail to convey to us their 
true meaning, unless we are able, by an effort of the 
imagination, to reproduce to ourselves the circum- 
stances, the habits of thought, the moral and spiritual 
perils of the people to whom they were written, and 
^Whately : "Rhetoric," p. 124. 



52 FACTS THE EXPRESSION OF TRUTHS. [lect. ii. 

the personal character and idiosyncrasies of the 
apostolic writers. If we are to understand the Epistle 
to the Galatians, we' must become, while we read it, 
members of one of the Galatian Churches, with our 
minds imperfectly liberated from heathenism, and 
impressed by the confident claims of those who pro- 
fess to be truer representatives of the new faith than 
St. Paul, from whom we first heard the gospel of 
Christ. We must know St. Paul as the Philippians 
knew him, and we must love him as they loved him, 
if we are to understand the Epistle to the Church at 
Philippi. There is hardly a page of Holy Scripture 
which will not become more intelligible to us if we 
read it with an active imagination. 

And when we have discovered for ourselves what 
the Scriptures were intended to teach, we shall not, 
if we are wise, forget the form in which the teaching 
is given. The facts are still the most effective ex- 
pression of the truths contained in them. The history 
of Joseph — of his slavery, his imprisonment, his rise 
to the government of Egypt — can never be made ob- 
solete by any theories of Providence ; nor the history 
of the sin and anguish of David by any theological 
argument demonstrating the necessity of repentance ; 
nor the history of the catastrophes which came upon 
the Jewish race by any ethical proof of the certain 
ruin which God will inflict upon a nation that revolts 
against the authority of the moral law. The miracles 
of Christ are still the most pathetic evidence of God's 
compassion for human infirmity and suffering. The 



LECT. II.] MR. MOODY. 53 

death of Christ is the final expression of the infinite 
love of God for all mankind. 

As the truths which we have to teach concerning 
God are contained in the facts which constitute the 
chief part of God's revelation of Himself to our race, 
so the ethical and spiritual laws which should regulate 
the Christian life are most vividly illustrated in the 
virtues and the vices, the sanctity and the sins, of the 
men whose story has been preserved to us in the Jewish 
and Christian Scriptures. The preachers who have 
learnt how to use these ancient facts are in possession 
of a power which reaches the hearts and consciences 
of all sorts of men. You know how Mr. Moody uses 
them. He talks as though Jacob had been an intimate 
personal friend of his ; as though he had met the 
patriarch near Bethel the morning after he had seen 
the vision of the ladder and the angels ; had been 
with him when his cruel sons brought to his tent the 
coat of many colours dipped in blood ; had seen the 
old man's face when in later years these same sons 
returned from Egypt and told him how roughly the 
governor had treated them, that he had charged them 
with being spies, that he had made them promise to 
bring Benjamin down into Egypt to verify their ac- 
count of themselves, and that meanwhile he had kept 
Simeon as a hostage of their good faith. While you 
are listening to Mr. Moody you are ready to think that 
he must have been in the boat with the apostles when 
Christ came to them over the stormy sea ; must have 
seen the lad who had the basket on his arm with the 



54 MR. MOODY. [lect. il 

five barley loaves in it and the two small fishes ; must 
have been at the wedding feast at Cana, and tasted the 
wine which came out of the waterpots. At times his 
realisation of the story he is telling becomes so intense 
that he almost makes you feel as though you as well 
as he had been in the upper chamber and listened to our 
Lord's last discourse to His disciples ; had seen Him 
rise to go, and then linger, because He had not yet told 
them all that was in His heart ; had gone with Him 
through the streets of Jerusalem and across the ravine 
of the Kedron, bright with the full moon,, to the dark 
shadows of the olive trees of Gethsemane ; had seen 
Him in His agony ; had been startled by the appear- 
ance of Judas with the crowd that came to arrest 
Him ; had followed Him afa,r off to the house of 
Caiaphas, and then to the judgment-hall of Pilate, 
and then to the palace of Herod ; had stood at last 
under the walls of Jerusalem and watched Him as He 
hung on the cross, crowned with thorns ; had been 
filled with terror by the earthquake and the darkness ; 
and had heard Him cry with a loud voice, " Father, 
into thy hands I commend my spirit." 

No doubt Mr. Moody makes the patriarchs and the 
apostles talk as though they had been born in Chicago. 
His reproduction of the ancient stories is wanting in 
exact historical truth, because the whole costume in 
which he clothes the characters is modern and western 
— not ancient and oriental. In fact, he translates the 
men themselves and their ways of thought and action 
into English, as the venerable scholars who produced 



LECT. II.] THE PREACHER TO USE EVERY FACULTY. 55 



our Authorized Version translated their mere words 
into Enghsh. In this respect I do not ask you to fol- 
low his example. With the knowledge of ancient life 
and manners which you have acquired in this university, 
it would be impossible, even if it were desirable, for 
you to follow it. But if you have any of that dra- 
matic imagination which he possesses in so eminent a 
degree, you ought to learn from him the wisdom of 
cultivating it, for it is one of the principal elements of 
his power as a preacher. 

Every intellectual faculty that contributes to the 
vivacity, keenness, and strength of the graver forms 
of secular eloquence, may also contribute to the 
efficiency of the Christian preacher. Not to appeal 
to the sermons of uninspired men, whose authority 
might be challenged, let us turn to the Holy Scrip- 
tures themselves. Examples of humour might be 
difficult to find, unless we admitted that it appears in 
a most cynical form in the Book of Ecclesiastes ; but 
there is surely something like it in that delicious 
touch of St. Paul's in the Second Epistle to the 
Corinthians (Chap. xii. 12, 13). " Truly the signs of 
an apostle were wrought among you in all patience, 
in signs, and wonders, and mighty deeds. For what is 
it wherein ye were inferior to other churches, except 
it be that I myself was not burdensome to you ? 
forgive me this wrongs Irony, and irony which at 
times becomes scornful, he uses freely in both epistles. 
" Seeing that many glory after the flesh, I will glory 
also. For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves 



56 IRONY AND SARCASM. [lect. ii. 

are wise" (2 Cor. xi. 18, 19). Again, "Who makcth 
thee to differ from another ? and what hast thou that 
thou didst not receive ? now if thou didst receive it, 
why dost thou glory, as if thou didst not receive 
it ? Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned 
as kings without us : and I would to God ye did 
reign, that we also might reign with you " (i Cor. 

iv. 7. 8). 

In the prophets, the idolatry into which the Jewish 
people were continually being betrayed is over- 
whelmed with the most bitter, contemptuous, and 
elaborate sarcasm. "Who hath formed a god, or 
molten a graven image that is profitable for nothing } 
. . . The smith with the tongs both worketh in the 
coals, and fashioneth it with hammers, and worketh it 
with the strength of his arms : yea, he is hungry, and 
his strength faileth : he drinketh no water, and is 
faint. The carpenter stretcheth out his rule ; he 
marketh it out with a line ; he fitteth it with planes, 
and he marketh it out with the compass, and maketh 
it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty 
of a man. . . . He heweth him down cedars, and 
taketh the cypress and the oak, which he strengtheneth 
for himself among the trees of the forest : he planteth 
an ash, and the rain doth nourish it. . . . He burneth 
part thereof in the fire ; with part thereof he eateth 
flesh ; he roasteth roast, and is satisfied : yea, he 
warmeth himself, and saith. Aha, I am warm, I have 
seen the fire : and the. residue thereof he maketh a 
god, even his graven image : he faileth down unto it, 



LECT. II.] WHEN A PREACHER SHOULD BE DULL. 57,. 

and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, 
Deliver me ; for thou art my god " (Isa. xliv. 10-17). 

I decline to acknowledge the binding force of those 
traditions which deny to the Christian preacher the 
weapons which have been consecrated by the hands 
of Isaiah and St. Paul. A prudent man will of course 
be careful to remember the tastes and the habits of 
the people to whom he has to preach ; and in congre- 
gations which have been long accustomed to the 
dignity of a dull propriety in the pulpit, a young 
minister will make it a matter of conscience to be 
dull ; or, at least, he will avoid making his sermons 
too interesting and too attractive. If he asserted the 
perfect intellectual freedom which Christ has given 
us, but which the traditions of some pulpits refuse to 
allow, he would fail to secure the very results for 
which — and for which alone — he has to use all his 
intellectual resources. We cannot speak to men effec- 
tively of the " wonderful works of God " unless we 
speak to " every man in his own tongue wherein he 
was born." Congregations which have not been ac- 
customed to the play of humour and fancy, to the 
glow of a fervid imagination, to the keen edge of 
sarcasm, will be perplexed and alarmed if sermons 
have too much intellectual vivacity in them. I say 
that they Avill be alarmed as well as perplexed : they 
will not only fail to recognise familiar truth in its 
unfamiliar form ; they will be shocked at what they 
will regard as the secularisation of the pulpit. It is 
still true that " one believeth that he may eat all things : 



58 IVEAK CONSCIENCES. [lect. ii. 

another, who is weak, eateth herbs." To the weak we 
may say, " Let not him which eateth not, judge him 
that eateth. . . . Who art thou that judgest another 
man's servant .? to his own master he standeth or 
falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up, for God is able 
to make him stand." But to the strong we must also 
say, " Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth 
not. ... I know, and am persuaded by the Lord 
Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself . . . But 
if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest 
thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat, 
for whom Christ died." Charity is the supreme law 
of Christian rhetoric as well as of the Christian life. 

" If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat 
no flesh while the world standeth ; " and the preacher 
who happens to be a man of genius, will say: To me 
it may seem that glorious truth should clothe herself 
in the glorious robes of imagination, and be crowned 
with the flowers of fancy; that in her gentler reproofs 
a pleasant irony may play, on her lips ; and that in 
her anger, indignation may flash from her eye, and 
the lightnings of a fierce sarcasm may be hurled by 
her hand. But if imagination, fancy, irony, and sar- 
casm make my brother to offend, I will become a 
fool for Christ's sake, and will be dull while the 
world standeth. 

To this severity of intellectual asceticism, however, 
I believe that none of us are called. It is very rarely 
that a preacher need be afraid of being too brilliant. 
But if we are loyal to Christ and the Church, we shall 



LECT. II.] SELF-DISPLAY. 59 

use our strength, not to win personal honour, but to 
prevail upon men to receive the teaching of Christ, 
to trust in His promises, and to keep His command- 
ments. Always, indeed, the highest kind of work 
implies the renunciation of all thought of personal 
display. The artist who is anxious that you should 
see how perfectly he can paint, instead of being 
anxious to paint perfectly, is certain to spoil his 
picture. He will annoy you by wasting his power 
on the satin coverlet of a bed or on a velvet dress, 
instead of using it to tell the story which he is pro- 
fessing to place on the canvas. The speaker who, 
instead of trying to enlarge your knowledge, to 
awaken your sympathy for suffering, or fire your in- 
dignation against injustice, is trying to show how well 
he can speak, will be equally unsuccessful. He may, 
perhaps, win the admiration of foolish, half-educated 
people, but he will excite no real interest, will kindle 
no passion, will produce no deep and enduring im- 
pression : men of sense will call him an impostor. 
He will not be even heard patiently by an audience 
of any kind that is really in earnest about the subjects 
he is professing to discuss. Ornamental speaking — 
speaking which is nothing more than an exhibition of 
intellectual strength, dexterity, and grace — may be 
well enough on ceremonial occasions, at public dinners 
and the like ; but when the minds of men are occu- 
pied with grave questions, speaking of that sort is 
hissed and howled down by a rough popular meeting, 
and is got rid of in an equally summary manner by 



6o ORNAMENTAL SPEAKING. [lect. ii. 

the most cultivated and dignified assembly. If the 
affairs of a railway are going wrong, and the share- 
holders are afraid of losing not only their dividends 
but their capital, they want a man who can tell them 
facts on which they can rely, and who can show them 
a way out of their difficulties. The most witty and 
amusing speaker, the most ingenious, the most bril- 
liant, will not be listened to unless he can make the 
position of affairs clearer, and unless he has some 
idea about how the property of the company can be 
kept together. If he is speaking only to show how 
well he can speak, the excited shareholders will either 
compel him to stop, or will throw him out of the 
window. In great national troubles, politicians do 
not want glittering periods, clever repartees, dainty 
epigrams : they want to be told how the famishing 
are to be fed, how crime is to be put down, how the 
discontent which menaces the stability of the national 
institutions is to be allayed, by what means war can 
be honourably averted, or by what means the nation 
can secure an honourable peace. A great statesman 
may also be a great orator. He may speak on these 
terrible questions, not only with terrible earnestness, 
but with incomparable brilliance, energy, and fire. 
His eloquence will in that case be of immense service 
to the principles and the policy which he is urging on 
the acceptance of the country. But if at such a time 
he is simply airing his rhetoric ; if he is as anxious 
to say graceful and humorous and beautiful things 
when he is dealing with dangers which threaten the 



LECT. II.] THE AGONY OF THE PREACHER. 6i 

lives and fortunes of the people and the honour and 
security of the state, as when he is proposing the 
toast of " The Ladies " at a lord mayor's banquet, he 
will provoke indignation and fierce contempt. 

It is not possible — it is not desirable — that you 
should always preach under the strain of that agony 
of earnestness with which I trust you will be some- 
times inspired. There are hours when the true 
minister of Christ is conscious that the celestial 
splendours are shining and glowing around him ; and 
there are hours when every fibre of his nature shivers 
with terror at the prospect of the indignation and 
wrath, tribulation and anguish, which menace the 
finally impenitent. Such hours, I trust, will come to 
you. When they come, you will preach as if the fate 
of every irreligious man in your congregation were 
to be determined at once — determined by a single 
sermon — determined by the vehemence with which 
you denounce sin ; the tenderness with which you speak 
of the infinite mercy of God ; the fidelity with which 
you reaffirm the certain destruction of all who persist 
in their revolt against God's authority ; the rapturous 
confidence with which you dilate on the glory, honour, 
and immortality which are the inheritance of all who 
trust in Christ and keep His commandments. 

But though these great and critical times can come 
to us only occasionally — our strength would be con- 
sumed if they came often — every sermon that we 
preach should have a relation more or less direct to the 
rescue of the world from sin and its restoration to God. 



62 BE BRILLIANT FOR CHRIST, [lect. ii. 

To accomplish this end we ought to use in the 
work of the ministry all the resources that God has 
given us — our keenest and most vigorous intellectual 
powers, and whatever we have learnt from the specu- 
lations of philosophers and theologians, from the 
songs of poets, from the adventures of travellers, from 
the history of nations, from the discoveries of science, 
from grand and beautiful scenery, from great pictures, 
from glorious music, from the ruined monuments 
of ancient empires, from the triumphs of modern 
civilisation, from the achievements and sufferings 
of heroes and saints, and from the common lives 
of common men. We should spend time and strength 
in the endeavour to make all that we have to say as 
clear, as strong, as effective as we can make it ; but 
if we have any sense of the tremendous issues of the 
conflict in which we are engaged between righteous- 
ness and sin, the love of God and the miseries of the 
human race, it will seem to us the greatest impiety to 
yield to the impulses of personal ambition, and we 
shall care for nothing except the glory of Christ and 
the salvation of mankind. 



I 



LECTURE III. 

READING. 

GENTLEMEN, — It is very possible that you may 
have thought me hard and uncharitable when 
I said in the last lecture that some men fail as 
preachers through intellectual indolence. Or perhaps 
you may have been generous enough to suppose that 
it was my ignorance of the religious life of America 
which led me to imagine that an American minister 
could ever be guilty of this vice. 

But the position of a minister on this side of the 
Atlantic, as well as on the other, is obviously very 
likely to encourage desultory intellectual habits ; and 
desultoriness and indolence are very near akin. With 
you, as with us, the judge has to be on the bench, the 
barrister in court, the solicitor at his office, the manu- 
facturer at his works, the merchant at his desk, the 
tradesman at his counter, at a definite hour every 
morning ; and not till a definite hour in the afternoon 
are they released. An indolent lawyer or man of 
business may, no doubt, go to his office, manufactory, 
or shop, half-an-hour or an hour late, and may often 
keep away altogether ; while he is there he may 
waste his time over the newspaper, or in gossip with 



64 MINISTERIAL DESULTORINESS. [lect. hi. 

men that call in and are as indolent as himself ; but 
the regular hours are a great help to regular habits ; 
they form a kind of frame, which a man knows he has 
to fill up with work. With you, as with us, the minister 
is under no such external constraint. If the judge is 
not on the bench when the court opens, he hears of it 
from the newspapers the next morning ; if the bar- 
rister is not ready to speak when the trial comes on, 
he has to meet the wrath of a furious client ; but the 
minister may get up late, or he may spend half-an- 
hour extra over his breakfast, reading an interesting 
letter from the Paris correspondent in the Times or 
the Tribime, or an exciting debate in Parliament or 
in Congress, and may go into his study at half-past 
nine instead of nine without incurring any immediate 
penalty. 

If a merchant leaves his letters unopened till the 
mail goes out, he knows that there is a chance of his 
receiving a sharp rebuke for not acknowledging a 
cheque, or he may miss a large order through not 
giving an immediate answer to an inquiry. But a 
minister, when he goes into his study on Tuesday 
or Wednesday morning, is under no compulsion to 
sit down to any definite occupation. He may be 
reading Dr. Dorner's " History of Protestant Theo- 
logy," and has got half through the first volume ; 
or he may have been working at the Epistle to the 
Romans, and has just reached the passage which 
has always perplexed him in the middle of the ninth 
chapter ; but he looks up at his shelves, and his eye is 



LECT. III.] IDLE HABITS. 65 

caught by a novel of Hawthorne's or of Thackeray's ; 
or the postman brings the New York Independent or 
the Spectator ; or he has just received the last book 
about Russia from the circulating library ; and so, for 
an hour or two, he reads the novel or the newspaper or 
the traveller's story, and before he turns to Dorner or 
to St. Paul the morning has half gone. 

A minister is in danger of being betrayed into idle 
habits by a thousand temptations of which other men 
know nothing. He has not slept well, or he is suffer- 
ing from a slight attack of indigestion ; the morning 
is fine ; there is nothing that absolutely compels him 
to keep at his desk, and he feels quite at liberty to 
stroll into the country. Or the weather is dull, and 
he is not in the mood for work ; there is no particular 
reason why he should not spend an hour in the news- 
room ; or he persuades himself that he will be fulfilling 
a pastoral duty if he calls on the pleasantest family 
in his congregation, and so he idles away a couple of 
hours in gossip. He has been trying to make out the 
exact meaning of a text, and the longer he tries the 
more perplexed he becomes ; and when his perplexity 
is at the very worst, a lady calls to talk to him about a 
girl in her class in the Sunday-school, and when she 
goes he finds that it is only three-quarters of an hour to 
dinner time. He thinks it is of no use returning to the 
text, and so he amuses himself with the most amusing 
article in the magazine which happens to be on the 
table. When he was at college he had fixed hours for 
work, and wrote his letters when he could. Now that 

6 



66 WHAT TO WORK AT. [lect. ill. 

he is in the ministry, if he gets a letter from an old 
college chum by the morning post, and if he is not 
obliged to give the morning to one of his sermons for 
next Sunday, he thinks he may as well answer it at 
once, and so he consumes in letter-writing one of the 
prime hours of the day. Gentlemen, it is four and 
twenty years since I left college, and the temptations 
to desultoriness which I have either yielded to or 
mastered would enable me to go on for four and 
twenty hours with the story of the perils which will 
beset you as soon as you leave these walls. You will 
be ruined, your own hopes and the hopes of your 
friends will all be blighted, unless you resolve, with 
God's help, to stand firm and to work as hard when 
you become a minister as you have worked while at 
the university. 

As to the subjects at which you should work, there 
is one piece of advice which I can give you with per- 
fect confidence : it is one of those " commonplaces " to 
which I attach so much value, that I thought it worth 
while to cross the Atlantic to insist upon them 
Keep up the knowledge which you have acquired at 
the university — your mathematics and science, if you 
can ; your ancient and modern languages, whether 
you can or not. There are few things more mortifying 
than for a man who, when he was four and twenty, 
could read his Cicero and Tacitus, his ^schylus and 
Plato, freely, to be obliged to puzzle over them with a 
grammar and dictionary when he is forty-five, and to 
discover a few years later that to him the music of the 



LECT. III.] HEBREW, GREEK, AND SYRIAC. . 67 

ancient poets is silent, and that the ancient orators are 
dumb. That you will keep up, more or less perfectly, 
your New Testament Greek is a matter of course ; but 
if I may judge from my own observation and from 
my own experience — I acknowledge it with shame — 
nothing is easier than for a minister to lose in a very 
few years his familiarity with Hebrew and Syriac. The 
precious results of months of hard work may vanish 
with extraordinary rapidity, and it will be very difficult 
to recover them. Of course, if a minister has once learnt 
to read his Hebrew Bible with ease and with keen 
interest, he will be certain to consult it often enough 
to prevent his knowledge of Hebrew from perish- 
ing altogether ; and a knowledge of the genius of the 
language, which is invaluable in the study of the Old 
Testament, can never be lost when it is once acquired 
But we ought to read the Hebrew Text regularly, and 
if the habit is continued for only a few years after 
entering the ministry, our knowledge, instead of being 
lost, will soon be extended, and will be ours for life. 
Syriac, although of immense use in New Testament 
exegesis, will vanish altogether unless you make a 
definite effort to retain it 

About German and French it is hardly necessary to 
speak. If you read these languages with ease before 
you leave the university, you will have such constant 
occasion to use them both, and you will find it so plea- 
sant to enlarge your acquaintance with French and 
German literature, that you will be in no danger of 
forgetting what you have learnt. 

6* 



68 SCHOPENHAUER. [lect. hi. 

But, as Schopenhauer said, " All that a man learns 
at the university is what he has to learn afterwards." 
There are some men, indeed, with a certain activity 
and superficial brilliance of intellect, who when they 
leave the university seem utterly unconscious of how 
much remains to be learnt. The theological creed of the 
Church to which they belong satisfies them perfectly ; 
they have no suspicion that it does not contain a 
complete account of the whole mystery of God's re- 
lations to the human race. They remind one, in their 
cleverness as well as in their shallowness, of George 
Eliot's description of Gwendolen in " Daniel Deronda." 
" In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken 
readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and 
unconnected facts which saves ignorance from any 
painful sense of ignorance." But in the case of men 
whose intellectual life has any depth and freedom, and 
who want to know how the great facts of the universe 
really stand, Schopenhauer's words are broadly true — 
they have learnt very little more than how much they 
have to learn afterwards. 

If I ventured to give you any very elaborate advice 
about the course of reading it will be expedient for 
you to foUov/ when you are in the ministry, I should 
be guilty of unpardonable presumption. I have lived 
far too active a life to have any pretensions to speak 
with authority on that subject. About the books you 
should read, you will do well to obtain the judgment 
of your professors. But there are some general sug- 
gestions arising out of my own experience which may 
be of some use to you. 



LECT. III.] THEOLOGICAL SYSTEMS. 69 

I assume that while you are here you will get a 
general view of the scheme of orthodox evangelical 
theology. You will carry away in your mind what 
may be called an index map of the whole territory of 
ascertained theological truth, as that territory is laid 
down by evangelical theologians of recognised autho- 
rity. You will have learnt how they define the prin- 
cipal doctrines of their creed, the relations which 
they conceive to exist between these doctrines, and 
the general nature of the evidence by which it is sup- 
posed that the truth of the doctrines is demonstrated. 
If when you are beginning to preach you discover 
that here and there the lines of the map are beginning 
to fade, that perhaps great breadths of country have 
vanished altogether, so that you can give no account 
of them, I think you will do wisely to recover your 
knowledge as soon as you are able. Whether you 
accept the whole scheme or not, you ought to be in 
complete possession of it. 

There are some preachers whose sermons — what- 
ever they are preaching about — remind one of the 
conversation of people that have never been out- 
side the village or the county in which they were 
born ; people who would settle the affairs of a 
great nation in the interests of their own particular 
parish, and with no other knowledge than that which 
they have acquired in discussing and managing their 
own parochial business. Have you never listened to 
preachers of that sort — to men whose whole mind is 
occupied with a solitary doctrine or a solitary group 
of doctrines, and who seem to have no thought of the 



70 DOCTRINAL PROVINCIALISM. [lect. hi. 

relations which these doctrines sustain to other truths, 
in which other men have the keenest interest, and 
which, when considered in the light of the history of 
the Church, are of the gravest importance ? The odd 
thing is that these preachers, who in religious thought 
are the victims of a temper analogous to that nar- 
row provincialism which, according to Mr. Matthew 
Arnold, is one of the chief infirmities or vices of the 
English nation, often claim to be " broad theologians." 
Their interest is narrowed to a very few great truths, 
and yet they imagine that their theology has the merit 
of exceptional breadth. You may do something 
towards protecting yourself against doctrinal provin- 
cialism by maintaining an intellectual acquaintance 
with truths in which you may be unable for a time 
to feel any deep moral or spiritual interest. 

Your chief work, however, and your most fruitful 
work during the earlier years of your ministry, will 
probably consist in the investigation of great truths 
on which you have arrived at no satisfactory conclu- 
sion while at the university, or which you feel to be of 
such transcendent importance in relation to your per- 
sonal religious life or to your ministerial work, that 
you are morally obliged to re-examine them with 
exceptional thoroughness and care. " Reading with- 
out purpose," says Lord Lytton, " is sauntering, not 
exercise. More is got from one book, on which the 
thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than 
from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye." i 
I " Caxtoniana," vol. ii. p. 327. 



LECT. III.] LYTTON AND BLACKIE. 71 

The brilliant professor of Greek in the University of 
Edinburgh has said much the same thing in another 
form. " Reading, in the case of mere miscellaneous 
readers, is like the racing of some little dog about the 
moor, snuffing everything and catching nothing ; but 
a reader of the right sort finds his prototype in Jacob, 
who wrestled with an angel all night, and counted 
himself the better for the bout, though the sinew of his 
thigh shrank in consequence." ^ If there is no great 
theological doctrine which you are compelled to re- 
construct for yourself from its very foundations — none 
which you are obliged to re-examine in order to 
satisfy restless and clamorous fears that the walls 
are perhaps giving way or that the roof is unsound — 
I advise you to select some important doctrinal con- 
troversy, and to resolve to study it thoroughly. But 
the intenser your moral and religious interest is in the 
truth you are investigating, the more profitable, even 
intellectually, is your work likely to be. 

In studying a doctrine, it is well to begin with its 
history. Learn how it grew ; who invented the tech- 
nical terms in which it is commonly defined ; what 
heresies stimulated orthodox theologians to develop 
the truth more fully, and compelled them to define 
it more rigorously. Take particular notice of the 
religious mood of the age in. which it was developed 
most rapidly and excited the most general and active 
controversy. Consider, too, what was the character 
of the dominant philosophy at successive periods in 
I John Stuart Blackie " On Self Culture," p. 29. 



72 DOCTRINAL STUDIES. [lect. hi. 

the history of the controversy. Fix in your memory 
the men and the books that had chiefly to do with 
impressing on the doctrine the various changes of form 
through which it has passed. You may learn most of 
these facts from a general history of Dogma ; if you 
can get a good special history of the particular doc- 
trine which you are investigating, you will of course 
prefer it. 

Then you will read for yourself a few of the great 
books, the names of which you have become familiar 
with in reading the history. You will soon learn 
how much of a book it is necessary to read for your 
purpose. In some cases you will be very likely to go 
wrong unless you read a book through, and read it 
through very carefully. In other cases, three or four 
chapters, or even a single chapter, will be enough. 
You must always try to be accurate in placing your 
author. If you do not remember the precise position 
of the controversy when he wrote, the errors which 
he regarded as most formidable, his conception of 
other doctrines more or less closely related to the 
doctrine under discussion, and the general spirit and 
modes of thought characteristic of his time, you will 
have no satisfactory understanding of his meaning. 
Athanasius wrote for the theologians of Alexandria, 
Antioch, Constantinople, and Rome, in the fourth 
century — not for Americans who were to live at New 
Haven, or for Englishmen who were to live in London 
or Birmingham, fifteen centuries after he was dead. 

To retain the results of your reading, most of you, I 



LECT. III.] NOTES. 73 

think, will find it necessary to read with your pen in 
your hand, and with a few sheets of paper on your desk 
A brief analysis of the principal lines of thought in a 
great book, and occasional extracts containing the 
most formal definitions of the author's theory and his 
characteristic technicalities, will enable you to recall 
the whole substance of volumes which might other- 
wise fade altogether from your memory ; unless, 
indeed, your memory is far less treacherous than my 
own. In preparing, two or three years ago, a series 
of lectures on the Atonement, I was able to save 
myself a large amount of labour by using notes of this 
kind which I had written sixteen or seventeen years 
before. If as you read you discuss in your notes the 
author's arguments and criticise his theories, you 
will obtain at the time a more complete mastery of 
his position, and your notes will be more useful to you 
afterwards. 

The objections to this practice are obvious. The 
process of summarising what we are reading may 
become as purely automatic as the process of report- 
ing what we are listening to. There is good reason to 
hope that the gentlemen of the press, to whose 
courtesy, intelligence, and skill all public men owe so 
much, are not cursed with any long remembrance of 
the speeches which they report with such surprising 
accuracy. Even when in their generous consideration 
and kindly compassion they correct our grammar for 
us, effect a rapid reconciliation between our nomin- 
atives and our verbs, achieve a surgical miracle on a 



74 REPORTING. [lect. hi. 

sentence which broke its back as it leapt from our 
lips, I imagine that the intellectual operations by 
which all this is accomplished are almost mechanical. 
A writer in a recent number of the Cojttemporary 
Review, who says that he has had large experience of 
work of this kind, tells us that he has never found him- 
self exhausted by working week after week for eighteen 
hours a day. " The reason," he says, " is, mainly, that in 
such work as in that of ordinary business the mind 
gets all the enormous help derivable from the laws of 
association. Link follows link, and the process goes 
upon an inclined plane to its goal, "i Nature is some- 
times kindly if she is often severe. When I think of 
the intellectual ability and varied accomplishments 
of many of the gentlemen who sit at the reporters' 
desk, and of the intolerable dulness and folly of many 
of the speeches which they have to transfer to their 
note-books, it is a consolation to be assured that the 
ear may listen and that the hand may write without 
the memory being charged with a solitary sentence. 
The sum of human misery is less than it seems. 

But, gentlemen, your own note-books may be filled 
very much in the same way. The hand may work 
with the eye, as it may work with the ear, without 
any vigorous concurrence of the intellect, and what 
is read accurately and written accurately may be for- 
gotten as soon as the note-book is closed. That you 
have to condense what you read, and make an abstract 
of it, does not secure you against this peril. Perhaps, 
1 Cojitemporary Review ^ April, 1877, p. 946. 



LECT. III.] NOTES. 75 

instead of reading with your pen in your hand, as I 
have suggested, you may find it some protection if your 
permanent notes — the notes you intend to keep by you 
for reference — are made from memory, after you have 
mastered your author's m.eaning, and when the book 
has been returned to the shelves. 

Notes of another kind and for another purpose 
may be made while you read. You may occasionally 
find it necessary to make a " scheme " of an argument 
in order to grasp it ; and you may often find it expe- 
dient to write out an argument in your own words and 
at some length in order to be sure that you understand 
it. In any case, while you are reading, be sure to keep 
your mind active. The habit into which I believe 
some students fall of making notes in the mechanical 
manner I have described, and " getting up " an author 
from their own dry abstract, deprives them of the 
generous stimulus and excitement which they would 
receive from direct contact with the vigorous activity 
of a powerful mind. 

This dissertation on the advantages and perils of 
notes — you will take it for what it is worth — has led 
me away from the subject which suggested it — the 
manner in which you should read the great books 
which have contributed to the formation of the par- 
ticular theological doctrine which you happen to be 
investigating. 

To offer you any advice that is likely to be service- 
able about the manner in which you read the Old and 
the New Testaments, in order to discover what 



76 '' proof-texts:' [lect. III. 



authority the doctrine — either in the substance of it 
or in any of the forms which it has assumed — derives 
from the teaching of the apostles, and from the his- 
tory and the discourses of our Lord Jesus Christ Him- 
self, is a more difficult task. Two methods are open 
to you. If you adopt one of these you will find a 
great part of the necessary work done for you already. 
In books easily accessible, dogmatic and controversial 
theologians have arranged and discussed all the 
" proof-texts " that can be alleged in support of almost 
every conceivable doctrinal proposition. Calvinists of 
every shade, Arminians of every school, Romanists and 
Protestants, the representatives and advocates of con- 
flicting or complementary theories on Original Sin, 
the Divine Decrees, the Moral Freedom of Man, 
the Person of Christ, the Atonement, the Nature and 
Effects of the New Birth, the Blessings included in 
Justification, the Conditions and Limits of Christian 
Perfection, the Sacraments, the Future of the, Impeni- 
tent, have put in evidence every sentence and every 
phrase and every isolated word of Holy Scripture 
that could be supposed to give any support to their 
respective positions. Whatever question we may be 
investigating, the whole of the Scripture proof, so far 
as it is contained in " proof-texts," is already in our 
hands. The arguments and replies on the case may 
go on for centuries longer, as they have gone on for cen- 
turies already ; but the inspired witnesses have been 
examined and cross-examined, their evidence is 
before the court, it seems unlikely that any further 



1 



LECT. III.] '' proof-texts:' 77 

testimony can be obtained from them. If the sen- 
tence is to be determined by the authority of the 
witnesses, why need we examine them again } Why 
should we not be satisfied with considering their evi- 
dence as it has been illustrated by the ablest men who 
have had the conduct of the case on both sides } 

I suppose that this is the common method of in- 
vestigating the scriptural authority of a doctrine. I 
do not disparage it. The conclusiveness of the " proof- 
texts" which are usually adduced in behalf of the 
great doctrines of the evangelical creed appears to me 
decisive. It would be a sign of intellectual presump- 
tion and excessive self-confidence if we did not avail 
ourselves of the kind of evidence in support of a 
theory or against it which is ready to our hand. But 
I always feel that the least part of the Scripture proof 
of a great doctrine is that which appears in a catena 
of proof-texts ; and I therefore recommend you not 
to suppose that you have all the light which the New 
Testament throws on any question which you are 
investigating, until, with that definite question before 
your mind, you have read the New Testament through 
from end to end. 

I speak of the New Testament alone, partly be- 
cause the New Testament may be read through in a 
very moderate amount of time, and partly because, 
in the determination of any theological inquiry of 
the kind to which I am now referring, the New Testa- 
ment is practically decisive. Historically, the inves- 
tigation of the religious ideas of the earlier books is pro- 



78 READ THE NEW TESTAMENT THROUGH, [lect. hi. 

foundly interesting, and the roots and germs of Christian 
thought are to be found in the writings of Moses and 
the prophets. It must also be conceded that there 
are parts of the teaching of the New Testament which 
can hardly be accurately understood without an ac- 
quaintance with the ancient institutions and traditional 
hopes of the Jewish race. But practically the student 
of Christian doctrine is governed by the authority of 
the Christian Scriptures ; and to ask you, whenev^er 
you are trying to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion on 
any doctrinal question, to read through the Old Testa- 
ment as well as the New, would be to impose on you 
an intolerable burden. 

As you read, you will come across the " proof-texts " 
which you have already considered in theological 
manuals and in controversial and dogmatic treatises. 
If I am not greatly mistaken, however, these texts 
will have new life and colour in them. You will come 
across them in their organic connection with the living 
system of thought to which they naturally belong. 
The words of Christ and of the apostles will receive 
an unexpected illustration from the circumstances 
which suggested them, from the emotion with which 
they were uttered, from the impression they produced 
on the people that heard them. A sentence may no 
doubt be perfectly intelligible when it is separated 
from the line of thought in which it occurs. The 
meaning of its terms may be fixed by the grammar and 
the lexicon beyond all rf^asonable controversy. But 
very often there can be no controversy at all if you 



LECT. III.] AN ARGUMENT OF ST. PAUL'S. 79 

read it as it stands ; its meaning is determined with- 
out appeal by the movement of thought which pre- 
cedes it and the movement of thought which follows 
it. The only true point of view from which to look 
at any sentence is the point to which the author has 
brought you by the path which leads up to it. 
Look at it from any other point, and you will not 
see it as he saw it, and as he intended that it should 
be seen by his readers. 

Take, for instance, the words of St. Paul in Rom. 
v. 10 : "For if, when we were enemies, we were re- 
conciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, 
being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life." The 
passage is quoted in support of the doctrine that the 
death of our Lord Jesus Christ is the objective ground 
on which God receives into His favour those whom 
He had regarded with hostility on account of their sins. 
But this application is denied. It is contended that 
St. Paul meant that through the revelation of the in- 
finite love of God in the death of Christ the hearts of 
those who regarded God with hostility are subdued to 
penitence, and that their hostility ceases. That the 
death of Christ has this effect is earnestly maintained 
by theologians who contend for an objective Atone- 
ment ; but how are we to discover whether St. Paul 
was thinking of the moral influence exerted by our 
Lord's death on the hearts of men, or of its direct 
relations to God Himself as the ground on which He for- 
gives sin .? The lexicon does not help us. The noun 
translated " enemies " may mean either those zvko are 



8o AN ARGUMENT OF ST. PAUns. [lect. iii. 

hostile to 7LS or tJiose to whom we are hostile. The verb 
translated " we were reconciled " may mean either 
that ive have ceased to have any anger against some 
one else, or that some one else has ceased to have any 
anger against ns. The sentence standing alone may 
therefore bear alternative interpretations. It may 
mean that through the death of Christ we Christian 
people have ceased to be hostile to God — a truth upon 
which all Christian theologians are agreed ; or that 
through the death of Christ the Divine wrath, which 
would have overtaken us sooner or later on account 
of our sin, is averted — a truth which those who re- 
ject the doctrine of an objective Atonement deny. 
The passage is claimed with equal vehemence and 
equal confidence by two rival doctrines. The lexicon, 
as I have said, leaves the contest undecided. How is 
it to be determined .'' 

How } Precisely in the same way in which we 
determine the meaning of a sentence which happens 
to catch our eye in the middle of a letter from a 
friend, when we are taking it out of the envelope. 
The sentence appears ambiguous at first sight, and 
if we looked at it alone, we might remain doubtful 
about its meaning for a month. But if we begin the 
letter and read it through, the ambiguity vanishes ; 
and the sentence would never have seemed ambiguous 
at all if we had not happened to see it before we had 
read the earlier part of the letter. 

And so, if your mind is filled and excited with the 
thoughts which occupy the first four chapters of the 



LECT. III.] AN ARGUMENT OF ST. PAUL'S. Si 

Epistle to the Romans, it seems to me that you will 
be incapable of placing on this sentence in the fifth 
chapter any other interpretation than that which is 
imposed upon it by the theologians who contend for 
an objective Atonement. In the middle of the first 
chapter St. Paul dismisses the introductory matter 
with the noble words : " I am not ashamed of the 
gospel of Christ : for it is the power of God unto 
salvation to every one that believeth ; to the Jew 
first, and also to the Greek." He then opens the 
doctrinal argument of the epistle by describing the 
gospel as a revelation of the righteousness of God. 
" Therein is the righteousness of God revealed from 
faith to faith ; as it is written. The just shall live by 
faith " — or " The just by faith shall live." But he passes 
immediately to another revelation of a very different 
and most awful kind — the revelation of the wrath 
of God from heaven against all unrighteousness. In 
what a terrible way this wrath has been revealed in 
the heathen world, he tells us in the last half of the 
first chapter. To St. Paul, the moral corruption of the 
heathen was the sign that God, in His hot anger 
against their idolatry, had " given them up to un- 
cleanness " and " unto vile affections." " As they did 
not like to retain God in their knowledge " — or, as it 
has been, felicitously translated — " because they repro- 
bated the knowledge of God, God gave them over to 
a reprobate mind." The crimes of which they were 
guilty — so St. Paul believed — were so foul, so gross, 
so revolting, that men would never have committed 



82 AN ARGUMENT OF ST. PAULS. [lect. iii. 

them had not God, in His just resentment at their 
revolt against His own authority, left them to them- 
selves, and suffered them to be swept on from sin to 
sin, from crime to crime, from shame to shame, 
by the dark and turbid stream of their own worst 
passions. The second chapter is a warning to the 
Jews that their knowledge of the law, and the condem- 
nation which they were so swift to pronounce on the 
crimes of the Gentiles, would be no protection for 
themselves against the judgment of God. God had 
shown them wonderful goodness ; but they might 
despise the riches of His goodness and forbearance 
and long-suffering, not seeing that the intention of the 
Divine long-suffering was to lead them to repentance. 
If, while they condemned others for breaking God's 
law, they broke it themselves, then St. Paul declares 
that in the hardness and impenitence of their hearts 
they were treasuring up unto themselves wrath against 
the day of wrath, and revelation of the righteous 
judgment of God, "who will render to every man 
according to his deeds : to them who by patient 
continuance in well - doing seek for glory, honour, 
and immortality, eternal life ; but unto them that are 
contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey 
unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, tribulation 
and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, 
of the ]&w first, and also of the Gentile :" this is the 
awful pre-eminence which St. Paul concedes to the 
Jews who have the law and break it. It is an 
appalling chapter. It is hot with the Divine wrath 



LECT. III.] AN ARGUMENT OF ST. PAUnS. 83 

against sin. While reading it I seem to be breathing 
the burning air which rises from streams of fiery 
lava, and my feet are scorched with the ashes which 
have just been thrown from the furnace of a volcano. 
In the early part of the third chapter the last hopes 
of the Jews are swept away. If they supposed that, 
although they were sinners, they would escape the 
Divine wrath, because " to them were committed the 
oracles of God " — and this was their chief distinction 
— let them turn to those very oracles. Do the Jewish 
Scriptures speak gently of the sins of Jews } In 
times of national corruption did psalmists and pro- 
phets shrink from uttering fierce words of condemna- 
tion } You remember the chain of passages which 
St. Paul quotes from the ancient Jewish books — pas- 
sages which express anger and hatred against Jewish 
sins. " Their throat is an open sepulchre ; with their 
tongues they have used deceit ; the poison of asps is 
under their lips ; their mouth is full of cursing and 
bitterness ; their feet are swift to shed blood ; des- 
truction and misery are in their ways, and the way of' 
peace have they not known ; there is no fear of God 
before their eyes." To be a Jew is not enough to 
shelter a man from the Divine wrath. What things 
soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under 
the law ; and the very end for which these words were 
written was that every mouth might be stopped — the 
mouth of the Jew as well as of the Gentile — and that 
so the whole world might become conscious of its 
guilt before God. " By t^.^e deeds of the law si all no 



84 AN ARGUMENT, OF ST. PAUL'S. [lect. in. 

flesh be justified in God's si^ht, for by the law is the 
knowledge of sin." 

It is from the Divine wrath that the world needs 
deliverance, and the deliverance is accomplished 
through Him whom God hath set forth for Him- 
self as a Propitiation — through faith — has set forth 
as a Propitiation in His blood ; to declare His right- 
teousness, that He might be just and the Justifier of 
him that believeth in Jesus. A Propitiation turns 
wrath aside. 

The fourth chapter is a parenthesis, and is intended 
to show, by an appeal to two of the greatest names in 
Jewish history — Abraham and David — that this doc- 
trine of justification by faith instead of by the works 
of the law was not new. In the fifth chapter, St. Paul 
exults in the blessings which come to us from the 
revelation of the Divine righteousness in Christ. 
Read the chapter in the fierce light of all that has 
been said in the earlier part of the epistle, and you 
will be incapable of missing its meaning. We were 
in peril of the wrath of God, but, "being justified by 
faith, we have peace with God through our Lord 
Jesus Christ;" that is, God is at peace with us. "By 
Christ we have also access into the grace wherein we 
stand." We who were exposed to the Divine anger 
are now standing in the Divine favour ; and more 
than this, we who had reason to dread the revelation 
of the righteous judgment of God — the indignation 
and wrath, the tribulation and anguish, which have 
been threatened against every soul of man that doeth 



I 



LECT. III.] AN ARGUMENT OF ST. PAUnS. 85 

evil — even we " triumph in the hope of the glory of 
God." Link after link is added to the golden chain, 
till the apostle exclaims, " God establishes — makes 
certain — his love toward us, in that while we were 
yet sinners Christ died for us ; much more then, 
being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved 
from the WRATH through him." The wrath which 
still threatens the impenitent and unbelieving, St. 
Paul cannot forget ; but through Christ we who 
believe shall be saved from it. " For if when we were 
enemies^' — when the wrath of God was impending 
over us on account of our sin, — " we ivere reconciled to 
Godl' — received into His favour, into " the grace where- 
in we stand," — '^ by the death of his Son, imcch more 
being reconciled shall we be saved by his /2y^,"^saved 
in the awful hour when His wrath against sin will be 
revealed. 

In this case a " proof-text " receives a definite and 
more intensely vivid meaning when we read it in its 
true place than when we read it in a classified list of 
quotations. There are other cases in which passages 
which could have no place in such a list may con- 
tribute materials of great value in relation to the 
doctrine we are investigating. We may sometimes 
discover, for example, what the apostles must have 
taught by observing the false impressions which their 
teaching produced upon their converts, impressions 
which are corrected in the epistles. St. Paul, in his 
preaching at Thessalonica, must have given great pro- 
minence to that glorious revelation of Christ which 



86 INDIRECT EXEGETICAL METHODS. [lect. hi. 

is the supreme hope of the Church, or it would have 
been impossible for the Thessalonians to imagine that 
their Christian brethren who had died had sustained 
an irreparable loss, and would not fully share the 
glory of those who will be " alive " at " the coming of 
the Lord." 

The slanders of the enemies of the apostles are an 
indication of what the apostolic doctrine must have 
been. That it should have been possible for the 
enemies of St. Paul to charge him with teaching that 
men may " do evil that good may come," and " sin 
that grace may abound," throws an intense light on 
St. Paul's teaching about justification. 

Further ; we should never forget that in the 
apostolic epistles it is assumed that the persons to 
whom they are addressed are already acquainted 
with the elementary facts and truths of the Christian 
revelation. It is very rarely, therefore, that the 
apostles state in a categorical form that our Lord 
Jesus Christ was divine ; but that they believed in 
His divinity is shown in the reverence and boundless 
love with which they speak of Him, in their habitual 
recognition of His authority over their moral life, 
their fervent gratitude for what He had done and 
suffered for themselves and all mankind ; it is shown 
by the immense significance which they attach to His 
sufferings and death, and by their trust in His mercy 
for the forgiveness of sin, and in the power of His life 
for strength to do the will of God ; it is shown by the 
awe and the fear with which they anticipate the hour 



LECT. III.] INDIRECT EXEGETICAL MEIHODS. 87 

in which He will judge the world. They very 
rarely affirm in so many words that Christ died 
for our sins, or that it is necessary to be born again 
of the Holy Spirit in order to enter the Divine 
kingdom and to inherit eternal glory ; but these 
truths are implied in all that they say about the great 
prerogatives and hopes of the Christian Church. One 
of the surest methods of ascertaining the contents of 
the apostolic faith is, therefore, to study closely the 
elements and characteristics of the apostolic life. 

How these principles will affect your method of 
reading an epistle, in order to discover the relation of 
the writer to any particular theological doctrine on 
which you are trying to form a judgment, needs no 
elaborate illustration. You will not look merely for 
passages in which the doctrine is definitely asserted. 
You will ask whether the writer's supposed faith in the 
doctrine accounts for his way of conducting an argu- 
ment — for what he omits that would naturally have 
occurred to him if he had held a hostile theory, as 
well as for what he has written ; whether it is the 
natural and necessary complement of truths which he 
explicitly affirms ; whether it is implied in his thanks- 
givings and prayers ; whether it explains any of the 
precepts which the epistle contains and the motives by 
which they are enforced ; whether if the doctrine had 
not been a recognised part of the Christian faith some 
of these precepts would have been necessary ; or 
whether if the precepts had been necessary they would 
have been enforced by different motives ; whether the 



88 INDIRECT EXEGETICAL METHODS. [lect. hi. 

errors which are corrected in the epistle — errors of 
opinion or errors of spirit and practice — could have 
originated in a natural misapprehension of the apos- 
tolic doctrine on the subject of your inquiry, and if so, 
in what form the doctrine must have been taught, to 
render the misapprehension possible. 

These same general principles of investigation may 
be applied to the history and teaching of our Lord 
Jesus Christ contained in the Gospels. Suppose that 
He had been a man and nothing more — would not 
the story of His life, and those passages of it which 
are most truly human, have run differently, even 
though the story had been written by the most unin- 
telligent and fanatical of His disciples, or by the most 
unintelligent and fanatical of their converts t Suppose 
that He had come — not to die for the sins of men, and 
to assert His own claims to supreme moral authority 
over the human race, but simply to teach nobler 
ethics and a nobler religious faith than the world had 
learnt before — would even His ethical teaching have 
assumed its present shape, would his religious teach- 
ing have been given in its present tone ? The Sermon 
on the Mount — is there nothing in the manner of it 
which implies that He claimed to be more than a 
prophet } The story of His relations to Mary His 
mother — is there nothing in it which suggests that He 
was infinitely more than her Son ? The facts which 
illustrate His relations to His human friends — do they 
not provoke many inquiries which receive no satisfac- 
tory solution except from the theory which attributes 



I 



LECT. III.] INDIRECT EXEGETICAI METHODS. 89 

to Him a superhuman dignity and glory ? How was 
it that He took it for granted that it was their highest 
moral and religious duty to forsake all in order to 
serve Him ? How was it that He never consulted 
them ? How was it that though on more than one 
occasion He prayed in their presence, He never 
prayed with them ? How was it that He never con- 
soled them in their moral weakness by assuring 
them that He too was conscious of the weakness 
which is common to humanity ? How was it that He 
never confessed sin ? i 

The results of this method of investigating the 
scriptural evidence in favour of any theological doc- 
trine may not always be easily available for contro- 
versial purposes ; they may sometimes be too subtle 
for use in your sermons ; but, if I may judge from my 
own experience, they will give great strength and 
certainty to your own theological convictions, and 
will continually suggest lines of thought which will 
make your preaching fresh, vigorous, and instructive. 

I hoped that I should have been able to finish this 
afternoon all the suggestions I intended to offer you 
about ministerial reading, but I find that I have some 
things to say which must be reserved for the next 
lecture. 

I See the argument of this paragraph elaborated in Harvey 
Goodwin's Hulsean Lectures for 1846, " The Glory of the only- 
begotten of the Father seen in the Manhood of Christ." 



LECTURE IV. 

READING (concluded). 

GENTLEMEN, — It is hardly necessary to remind 
you that a man may have clear and strong 
theological convictions ; may have a large acquaint- 
ance with the contents of the Holy Scriptures and with 
the history of the doctrinal thought of the Church, 
and may yet be a dull and ineffective preacher. There 
are many men whose knowledge is rich and varied, 
but who cannot teach. And of those who can teach 
— that is, address a solitary faculty of human nature, 
the understanding — how few there are who can com- 
pel every province in the broad continent of the 
intellectual and moral life of man to confess their 
authority and power. It is one thing to have a clear 
perception of Christian truth ourselves ; it is quite 
another thing to be able to make the truth clear to 
the common mind ; to force the conscience to feel its 
pressure ; to disturb the slumbers of those mysterious 
instincts which vindicate our kinship to God ; to call 
to the aid of the Gospel all the friendly powers of 
man's moral life ; to speak of the divine anger so as 
to rouse the fears of men ; to kindle their imagination 
by illustrations of the nobleness, and beauty, and 



LECT. IV.] A FALSE QUOTATION. 91 

blessedness of a life in God ; to move them to peni- 
tence, and to inspire them with faith in the infinite 
love of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

You, gentlemen, are to be preachers. The instru- 
ment you have to master stands before you — the 
soul of man. You have to learn how to handle every 
stop and to touch every key, and to bring out of it 
the sweetest, richest, saddest, wildest, most stately and 
most triumphant spiritual music. I know that you 
can do nothing except though the concurrence of the 
great power of God ; but if I understand anything of 
the laws which determine the success of our preach- 
ing, we have no right to hope that God will work with 
us unless we work ourselves. No matter how earnestly 
we pray, we may take it for granted that God will not 
do His part unless we do ours. "Work without 
prayer," said an old English writer, whose name I 
have forgotten, " is atheism ; and prayer without work 
is presumption." If we have to work at all we should 
try to work in the most effective way. 

There is a saying of St. Paul's which is often quoted 
inaccurately, and the false quotation produces a most 
pernicious impression. He is represented as saying, 
"Paul may plant and Apollos may water, but God 
must give the increase." However true this may 
be — and I do not for a moment dispute its truth — 
the quotation in that form seems to imply that 
between human work and the divine blessing, which 
alone can make it successful, there is only a casual 
and uncertain relation. I prefer to take St. Paul's 



92 *' THE ARM OF FLESH r [lect. iv. 

words as he wrote them : — "I planted, Apollos 
watered, but God gave the increase." St. Paul did 
not mean to imply that after we have done our best 
it is as likely as not that God may do nothing. The 
Corinthian Christians were divided into factions. 
They quarrelled about the merits and claims of their 
religious teachers. St. Paul reminds them that who- 
ever may do the work, the glory of its success belongs 
to God. 

The inference which is sometimes drawn from these 
words, even when they are not misquoted, is as pre- 
posterous as it is mischievous. Since the success of 
our work comes from God, it is argued that know- 
ledge — though as profound as St. Paul's — and elo- 
quence — though as fervent as the eloquence of Apollos 
— count for nothing. It would be equally reasonable 
to argue that because the vintage comes from God it 
counts for nothing whether or not the vine-grower 
understands his business and works hard in the vine- 
yard. God gives no vintage if men plant elms instead 
of vines. The vine itself will bear no grapes unless 
God gives " the increase ; " but it may be so planted 
that it will be certain to die in a week ; it may be so 
cultivated, or the cultivation may be so neglected, that 
the life and vigour of the vine will be fatally injured. 

Knowledge is clearly of some importance. A man 
must know something about Christian truth or he can- 
not preach the gospel at all. And who can tell when 
he knows so much that more knowledge will be use- 
less to him "i We are surely trusting just as much in 



LECT. IV.] '' THE ARM OF FLESIV 93 

the " arm of flesh " when we insist that a minister 
must know a httle as when we insist that it is 
desirable that he should know a great deal. 

" Yes," it may be replied, " we admit that the more 
a minister knows about God the better he is qualified 
for his work, but what we object to is a solicitude about 
style and rhetoric and human learning ; this shows 
that ministers are relying on the wisdom of men and 
not on the power of God." And yet, I suppose that 
if the good people who talk to us in this way send a 
missionary to China to preach the Gospel, they expect 
him to learn Chinese. Why it should be supposed 
that a Christian missionary in China betrays no want 
of faith in God when he learns the words of the 
Chinese language from a dictionary, its construction 
from a grammar, its idioms from intercourse with the 
people, but that a Christian minister in the United 
States, or in England, is " trusting in an arm of flesh " 
when he tries to increase his knowledge of English 
by studying the great English authors, and when he 
listens to homiletical lectures and reads books on 
rhetoric, in order that he may learn how to speak 
more clearly and more effectively, is to me wholly 
incomprehensible. Since we have to preach, we ought 
to learn how to preach well. 

Some men speak contemptuously of lectures on 
preaching and treatises on the science or art of rhetoric. 
For myself, I have read scores of books of this kind, and 
I have never read one without finding in it some useful 
suggestion. I advise you to read every book on 



94 THE THEORY OF PREACHING. [lect. iv. 

preaching that you can buy or borrow, whether it is 
old or new, CathoHc or Protestant, EngHsh, French, or 
German. Learn on what principles the great preachers 
of other churches as well as of your own, of other 
countries as well as of your own, of ancient as well as 
of modern times, have done their work. If your ex- 
perience corresponds with mine, the dullest and most 
tedious writer on this subject will remind you of some 
fault that you are committing habitually, or of some 
element of power which you have failed to use. 

But useful as you will find the study of the theory 
of preaching, you will probably find that the study of 
the sermons of successful preachers is equally useful. 
The artist is not satisfied with reading scientific 
treatises on Perspective and lectures on Painting, nor 
even with watching sea and land, mountain and glen, 
forest and river, under their changing aspects, from 
the cold grey light of the early morning to the fiery 
splendours of sunset; he spends months and years, 
if he is able, in the galleries of Florence and Rome, of 
France, Germany, and England, trying to learn how 
the immortal masters of form and colour worked the 
miracles in the presence of which generation after 
generation has stood with wonder and delight. You 
will derive great advantage from following their 
example. 

Of Chrysostom and the other famous preachers of 
the ancient Church I will not venture to speak ; but let 
me advise you to study the sermons of Bossuet, Bourda- 
loue, and Massillon, of Lacordaire and Ravignan, of 






LECT. IV.] SERMONS TO BE READ. 95 

Monod and Bersier ; of Latimer and Jeremy Taylor, 
Barrow, South, and Tillotson ; of Howe and Owen and 
Watts ; of Chalmers, Edward Irving, and Guthrie ; of 
Robert Hall, and Dr. Maclaren of Manchester, and 
Charles Spurgeon ; of Thomas Binney and James 
Parsons; of John Henry Newman and Dr. Pusey; of 
Archdeacon Manning — about the sermons of Cardinal 
Manning I know nothing ; of Frederick Robertson 
and Canon Liddon. The merits of American preachers, 
both living and dead, are better known to you than 
they can be to me. From some of your living 
preachers I have learnt very much ; so much that I 
have often felt how superfluous and even presump- 
tuous it is for me to have crossed the Atlantic to deliver 
these lectures ; among the dead I am under excep- 
tional obligations to Jonathan Edwards and Mr. 
Finney. To these names I trust you will allow me 
to add that of another man, from whose theology I 
differ widely, but for whose power and resources as a 
preacher, and for whose courage in standing by the 
cause of freedom in evil times, I have the greatest 
admiration — I refer to the late Theodore Parker. 

Of the German preachers I know too little to have 
the right to select the names of those who are best 
worth reading. Of the Italian preachers I know only 
one — Segneri, some of whose sermons were translated 
a few years ago by an English clergyman ; they are 
very striking. 

If you read sermons wisely, it will not be with the 
hope of discovering " suggestive thoughts," as we are 



96 HOW TO READ SERMONS. [lect. iv. 

accustomed to call them in England — thoughts which, 
with a very little cultivation, you may grow into 
sermons of your own ; — but you will read with a keen 
eye for the qualities which have given to the great 
preachers of our own and of past times the power they 
exerted over the men that listened to them. You 
will notice what subjects they preached on, and the 
sort of texts they selected. You will try to find out 
the principles and methods which governed them, 
consciously or unconsciously, in the arrangement and 
development of their principal thoughts. You will ask 
whether the introduction to the sermon you are 
reading really introduces what comes after it ; you will 
observe how the preacher effects his " transitions " — to 
which French preachers attach so much importance — 
from one principal division of his subject to another. 
You will endeavour to discover what is the secret of 
his success in investing very familiar truths with fresh 
interest. You will consider the amount and the kind of 
truth which he has been able to present to a congre- 
gation in a single discourse. You will notice how he 
handles his illustrations. You will especially study 
the methods in which he appeals, directly or indirectly, 
to the hopes and fears of men, to their moral imagina- 
tion, to their conscience, to their sense of shame, to 
their susceptibility to gratitude, to all the active ele- 
ments of their moral and religious nature. 

In judging of sermons you will, of course, take into 
account the kind of effect which the men who preached 
them are known to have produced. The sermons 



LECT. IV.] HOW TO READ SPEECHES. 97 

which have been preached in great revivals deserve 
special study. If they did their work, you may take 
it for granted that there is much to be learnt from 
them. For the practical ends of your ministry you 
may find it far more profitable to study the sermons 
of the late Mr. Finney, and to listen to my friend Mr. 
Moody, than to spend your strength on the preachers 
that were admired by the Court of Louis XIV. 

You ought to study the speeches of great secular 
orators in the same way. The speeches of Lord 
Erskine, of Charles James Fox, of Plunket, of Grattan, 
of Lord Brougham, of Mr. Bright, will repay careful 
reading. The varying merits of your own orators are 
known better to you than to me. In reading them 
you will not be satisfied with admiring " fine passages." 
The best and strongest parts of a speech — the parts 
which reveal the true genius of the orator — are not 
always the most brilliant. It was not with the deco- 
rated hilt of his sword that the old knight cleaved in 
two the skull of his enemy ; nor was it the shining 
plume on his helmet that protected his own head. 
Very often the real strength of a speech lies in no 
particular passage which you can learn and declaim, 
but in the skilful arrangement of its arguments, illus- 
trations, and appeals ; and the keen edge of it is some- 
times to be found in passages which are destitute of 
ornament, and which may even look almost careless in 
their style. 

The way to make your study of a great speech 
really useful is to place yourself in the position of the 

S 



98 HO IV TO READ SPEECHES. [lect. iv. 

speaker ; to remember his previous history, the kind of 
authority he had with his audience, the confidence or 
the distrust, the enthusiasm or the hostiHty, with which 
they regarded him. You must also recall the position 
of the cause he was defending or attacking, the know- 
ledge which his audience possessed of its merits and 
demerits, the measure of their sympathy with the side 
to which the speaker was committed, or of their an- 
tagonism to it. Try to understand what were the weak 
points in his case and what were the strong points ; 
what aspects of it were likely to secure the goodwill 
of the audience, and what aspects of it were likely to 
provoke hostile prejudice. Then look into the speech 
and try to learn how all the conditions under which it 
was delivered influenced the orator in the tone which 
he assumed when he began to speak — made him 
courteous or defiant, resolute and uncompromising, or 
modest and conciliatory. If his tone changed as he 
went along, ask why, and whether the change was wise. 
Consider, too, how the conditions under which he was 
speaking determined him to use some arguments 
which may not strike you as being in themselves very 
conclusive, and to avoid others which in themselves 
may seem to you to have much greater force. 
Consider how these conditions influenced him in the 
arrangement of his topics, in his allusions and illus- 
trations. Take particular notice of the way in which 
he explains to his audience what he thinks they may 
have misunderstood, and does it without implying that 
they are ignorant, or that they have formed their 



LECT. IV.] HOW TO READ SPEECHES. 99 

Opinions hastily and rashly. Observe how he presents 
over and over again, in different forms, the strong 
parts of his argument, the facts, the inferences, with 
which he is most anxious to fill the minds of those 
whom he is trying to convince. Watch him in his 
methods of relieving the attention of his audience ; 
consider the use he makes of humour, or of wit, or of 
imagination. Observe how, by a passing allusion, he 
touches the deepest sympathies, or the just pride, or 
perhaps the ambition and the self-interest, of those 
w^hom he is addressing. " Fine passages " may occur 
here and there ; but a true orator never uses them for 
their own sake. Pie wants to convince his audience 
of the innocence of his client ; of the soundness of the 
political principles which he is defending, or the rotten- 
ness of the political principles which he is assailing ; 
of the merits of his own political friends and the de- 
merits of his opponents. If " fine passages " will help 
him, well and good ; but if not, then he does without 
them. 

The resources and methods of the preacher differ, 
no doubt, from the resources and methods of the legal 
or political orator ; but you may discover in the 
speeches of great lawyers, statesmen, and agitators, 
many suggestions which, if you are wise, you will be 
able to use in the preparation of your sermons. Read- 
ing of this kind will also do something to prevent that 
want of completeness and symmetry in your intellectual 
development which is likely to be the result of exclu- 
sive devotion to theological studies. Thomas Taylor, 

8* 



loo GENERAL READING, [lect. iv. 

the Platonist, used to show with pride two of his 
fingers which, in copying out the manuscripts of 
Proclus and Plotinus in a fine Greek hand, had been 
so bent that he had lost the use of them. " It would 
be well," says Hazlitt, who tells the story, "if our 
deep studies often produced no other crookedness and 
deformity." ^ 

To avoid this " crookedness and deformity," and to 
maintain free intellectual relations with cultivated men 
who are not professional theologians, as well as to satisfy 
your own intellectual tastes, which, I trust, you will 
always think it a duty to keep healthy and active, there 
are other kinds of reading which you will not permit 
yourselves to neglect. History — and especially the 
history of your own country ; the lives of men who 
have exerted a great and critical influence on the 
fortunes of great nations, who have originated re- 
markable religious movements, or who are famous 
in literature and art ; the leading and authoritative 
books on political economy ; books which illustrate 
the laws of social and national life; books which 
present the ascertained results of the investigations of 
modern science: all these will enrich your thought, 
will prevent you from becoming mere sermon-makers 
and theological pedants. 

It is hardly necessary that I should suggest that you 

should read the books which, through century after 

century, have succeeded in charming the imagination 

and the hearts of men living in different countries, and 

I " Sketches and Essays," p. 6. 



LECT. IV.] POPULAR BOOKS. loi 

speaking different tongues. You may not be able to 
see the bazaars of Cairo, Damascus, and Bagdad, but 
from "The Arabian Nights" you may learn more about 
the East than some people seem to know when they 
come home after a long Eastern tour ; and " Don 
Quixote " may teach you as much as a month in 
Spain. Other books, not as famous as these, have as 
strong a claim upon all who speak the English tongue. 
It is a disgrace for an American or an Englishman 
not to have read " Robinson Crusoe;" and, if I may 
dare to say it, Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" and 
" Holy War" are quite as profitable reading for our 
purposes as very much that was written by Augustine 
himself. 

Having found courage to say this, I think I may as 
well ruin myself altogether by saying something more. 
At the risk of bringing down upon myself the sharp 
and scornful condemnation of the more learned persons 
in my audience, I will venture to add that I do not re- 
commend you to refuse to read books that have a 
merely ephemeral popularity. If you were all des- 
tined to occupy university chairs, I might offer you 
different advice — supposing that, in that case, I could 
presume to offer you any advice at all — and yet 
it may be possible that even in the library of a pro- 
fessor of ecclesiastical history, above the shelves on 
which the folios of the Magdeburg centuriators and the 
rival Annals of Baronius stand side by side in solemn 
and awful dignity, there may be a shelf that gives a 
kindly refuge to " Helen's Babies ; " and I trust that I 



102 EPHEMERAL BOOKS. [lect. iv. 

am guilty of no irreverence if I imagine that even a pro- 
fessor of dogmatic theology, if he has unfortunately 
forgotten to put a volume of Athanasius or Aquinas 
into his portmanteau to while away the tedious hours 
of a railway journey, may go to a book-stall and buy 
a volume of Mark Twain's, or the last book by Bret 
Harte. I am conscious, however, that in these wild 
speculations I am venturing on very thin ice. But we 
who are not professors have to interest and impress 
common people ; and whatever may be said about the 
dissipation of intellectual energy incurred by the 
attempt to read all the books that other men are talk- 
ing about, I am convinced that we ought to keep up 
a fair acquaintance with contemporary literature. If 
we know nothing of the books that our congregations 
are reading, they will soon learn to think of us as 
intellectual foreigners — strangers to their ways and 
thoughts, ignorant of a large part, and in some 
respects the most interesting part, of their lives. 

You will not misunderstand me. Your strength 
must be given to grave and continuous studies. You 
will fence round the prime hours of the day and keep 
them for hard work, or else you will be lost. But the 
humblest cottage should have a flower-bed as well as 
a potato plot ; and even in England, where ground is 
becoming scarce, I should be sorry to see the village 
green ploughed up and turned into a corn-field. This 
desultory and miscellaneous reading will give you a 
certain intellectual exhilaration, and will enable you 
to do your severer work with greater vigour. 



LECT. IV.] INTELLECTUAL '' hobbies:' 103 

I always envy the men who have an intellectual 
hobby — a hobby which they learned to ride when 
they were young — perhaps when they were boys ; 
and on which, even in their busiest years, they continue 
to trot with as much enjoyment as ever. To have 
some pursuit in which we are keenly interested, 
lying outside our serious and imperative occupa- 
tions, is a great intellectual refreshment. It does not 
very much matter what the pursuit is. Some men 
collect ancient coins and learn all about them ; some 
men care for a particular department of natural 
science ; some concentrate their historical reading on 
a particular century in the history of a particular 
country ; some men devote themselves to a particular 
poet and to all the literature that illustrates what he 
has written ; some to Egypt, some to Holland, some 
to Florence, some to Rome. If we do not give to 
these by-subjects the time and energy which we ought 
to give to the main business of life, they are an un- 
qualified advantage to us. 

Though we may have nothing that can be called a 
" hobby," we may have our favourite books. There is 
a wonderful charm in reading a book every line of 
which is familiar to you. It is like talking over 
school days and college days with an old friend. You 
have heard him tell every one of his tales a dozen 
times ; you know as soon as he begins a story how it 
will end ; you anticipate his look when he comes to 
his comic passages, and the tone in which he will tell 
them, and the precise point at which he will explode 



104 FAVOURITE BOOKS. [lect. iv. 

in irrepressible laughter ; but the old stories from the 
old friend have a greater charm than the fresh wit of 
a stranger. Or, it is like walking along the roads of a 
pleasant country in which for many years we have 
spent our holiday. We know the trees and the 
brooks and the bridges ; we look for the picturesque 
cottages which we shall have to pass ; we are pre- 
pared for the view of the distant mountains or the 
shining sea, which is caught at a particular turn in the 
road : in seeing the old objects one after another, 
when we have been away from them for a few 
months, there is a kind of pathetic surprise which 
touches us far more deeply than the surprise of 
novelty.^ 

If books are anything more to us than mere paper 
and printer's ink, if, while we read, to use the felicitous 
language of Bolingbroke, "we live with men who lived 
before us, and inhabit countries which we have never 
seen," we shall have our elect friends in our library as< 
well as among living men and women ; and there will 
be books that will have the same kind of power over 
our imagination and our heart as the village among 
the hills which we dream about when we are worn 
down with our winter's work, and in which summer 
after summer we have found rest and health and 
vigour. 

The old books remain while everything else passes 
away. The chances and changes of this mortal life 
do not touch them. The fields in which we picked 
I See Note at the end of the Lecture. 



I 



1 



LECT. IV.] FAVOURITE BOOKS. 105 

wild flowers and played cricket when we were boys 
are covered with dreary streets. The houses in which 
we lived have been pulled down, and there are un- 
familiar buildings on the site of our old homes. The 
churches in which we worshipped have been enlarged 
or rebuilt. The preachers to whom we listened are 
dead, and the faces we remember so well are no lono-er 
seen in the old pews ; or, if they are there still, they 
are greatly changed. The brilliant and romantic lads 
of our youth have become hard and prosy men ; 
the bright wild girls have become very uninteresting 
matrons ; the aged people, whose sorrows and loneli- 
ness we pitied, or whose sanctity we reverenced, have 
all passed away. We ourselves are conscious, as the 
years drift by, that our strength is not what it once 
was ; that there is less elasticity in our step ; that we 
are more easily tired ; that our sight is at times a 
little dim and our hearing a little dull. But we open 
cur books, and the vanished years return. Time has 
run back and fetched the age of gold.^ The fancy 
of Jeremy Taylor is as free and as fresh, and the 
wit of South is as keen, and the fervour of Baxter 
is as intense, as when we first heard them preach. 
Charles James Fox is still speaking with undi- 
minished energy and fire on the Westminster scru- 
tiny. We knew old Lear w^hen we were boys ; he is 
no older now. IMost of the young men and maidens 

I " For if such holy song 
Inwrap our fancy long, 
Time will run back a7id fetch the age of gold." 

Milton's " Hymn on the Nativity." 



io6 FAVOURITE BOOKS. [lect. iv. 

whose love passages entertained us when we ourselves 
were young are old married people, and occasionally 
wrangle over the expenses of housekeeping ; but 
Romeo and Juliet are courting still : 

" For ever he will love and she be fair." ^ 

What books you will choose as your intimate 
friends will depend upon your humour and taste. 
Dr. Guthrie's choice seemed to me charming. He 
told me that he read through four books every year — 
the Bible, " The Pilgrim's Progress," four of Sir Walter 
Scott's novels, which he reckoned as one book, and a 
fourth book, which I have forgotten, but I think it was 
" Robinson Crusoe." You will choose some books 
because they soothe and quiet you ; some because 
they are as invigorating as mountain air ; some 
because they amuse you by the shrewdness of their 
humour ; some because they give wings to your fancy ; 
some because they kindle your imagination. 

But there are books of another kind, which have 
graver claims. Every great and original writer has 
his characteristic intellectual method. He has his 
own way of approaching every question that he 
discusses ; his own way of investigating the evidence 
of every doubtful proposition ; his own way of analys- 
ing and destroying the arguments which are alleged 
in support of a position which he rejects ; and his 
own way of developing the proof of a position which 
he maintains. If you read him carefully you will also 

^ " For ever wilt thou love and she be fair." — Keats's "Ode to 
a Grecian Urn." 



I 



LECT. IV.] GREAT BOOKS. 107 

discover that there are certain settled principles of 
judgment which are explicitly or implicitly recognised 
in all his intellectual decisions. These correspond 
to those great constitutional principles and those 
authoritative legal maxims which are current in the 
law courts and which govern an infinite variety of 
cases. It is another quality of a writer of original 
and creative genius that he is never satisfied with 
dead thought. Whether his ideas are true or false, 
they have such vital force in them that they are 
capable of indefinite growth, and are the roots of 
whole systems of speculation. 

Close familiarity with a few great books will do 
more than anything else to enrich and discipline your 
mind. If we walk day after day with some illustrious 
writer, we shall naturally fall into his pace. Thinking 
his thoughts over and over again, we shall uncon- 
sciously adopt his methods of thinking. He will train 
us to his own habits of caution, moderation, and saga- 
city. He will inspire us with his own courage and 
boldness. We shall catch, without knowing it, and 
without any attempt at imitation, something of that 
intellectual manner which gives to everything that 
he has written an inimitable nobleness, or vigour, or 
grace. We shall become masters, not only of all the 
thoughts which are actually expressed in his books, 
but of very much that these thoughts imply. We 
shall fully develop truths which were present to him 



1 



in a rudimentary form. We shall not be satisfied 
with coming into possession of the rich golden grain 



io8 LEARNING AND PIETY. [lect. iv. 

which he was able to garner, we shall drive our own 
plough across the fields which he first reclaimed frorri 
the waste ; we shall practise his methods of cultiva- 
tion ; we shall sow the seed which he has left us ; and 
we shall reap fresh harvests of our own. 

Perhaps you may say that I am expecting from you 
an enormous amount of intellectual labour — an amount 
of intellectual labour which you may even fear would 
be inconsistent with the culture of your personal 
religious life and with hearty and unreserved devotion 
to your ministerial duties. In England, during the 
last thirty years, we have seen from time to time very 
unpleasant indications of a distrust of the influence of 
literature and learning on ministerial earnestness and 
efficiency. We are told that the Church does not 
need more intellectual culture in the ministry, but 
more spiritual fervour ; that we spend too much time 
with our books and too little in active, energetic 
labour for the salvation of mankind. The good men 
who indulge in complaints of this kind are in the 
habit of uttering loud lamentations over the disap- 
pearance of the simpler piety and deeper devotion of 
our fathers. The traditions of Puritan faith and 
fervour are appealed to in order to shame and to 
stimulate our languid zeal. They cannot be invoked 
too often. 

But what kind of men were these saintly ancestors 
of ours .'' Did the fire of their devotion burn so high 
because it was not choked with an excess of intellec- 
tual fuel ? Were they better men than we are because 



\ 



LECT. IV.] THE PURITANS. 109 

they had less learning ? Were they more zealous as 
ministers because they were less industrious as 
students ? 

John Howe was a great theologian and a great 
preacher ; but he was something more. " None can 
peruse his writings," says his biographer, my own ac- 
complished tutor, Mr. Henry Rogers, " without seeing 
in almost every page traces of his ardent admiration 
for Plato, and proofs that it was the admiration of a 
kindred mind.''^ But if the lofty idealism of Plato 
was most akin to his own genius, his " Living Temple " 
shows that he had an extraordinary mastery of the 
whole range of philosophical speculation. He knev/ 
the modern writers as well as the ancient. A con- 
siderable part of his greatest treatise is a reply to 
Spinoza ; and he had studied Descartes, and speaks 
of him as "that great and justly admired master in 
this faculty," and " that famed restorer and improver 
of some principles of the ancient philosophy." ^ The 
theological learning of John Owen, in its immense 
extent and its massiveness, has sometimes reminded 
me of those vast ruins which still perpetuate the 
grandeur of ancient Rome. Some years ago, when I 
was young and had my own ambitions, I extracted a 
passage from Richard Baxter — I forget in which of 
his works it is to be found — in which he tells us in 
confidence the nature and variety of his own studies. 
He says : "I have looked over Hutten, Vives, Erasmus, 

^ " Life of Howe," p. 20. 
2 "Works," vol. iii. pp. 53, ^^^ 



THE PURITANS. [lect. iv. 



Scaliger, Salmasius, Casaubon, and many other criti- 
cal grammarians, and all Gruter's critical volumes. I 
have read almost all the physic and metaphysics I 
could hear of. I have wasted much of my time 
among loads of historians, chronologers, and anti- 
quaries. I despise none of their learning ; all truth is 
useful. Mathematics, which I have least of, I find a 
pretty, manlike sport. ... I have higher thoughts of 
the schoolmen than Erasmus and our other gram- 
marians had : I much value the method and sobriety 
of Aquinas, the subtlety of Scotus and Ockham, the 
plainness of Durandus, the solidity of Ariminensis, the 
profundity of Bradwardine ; the excellent acuteness 
of many of their followers ; of Aureolus, Capreolus, 
of Bannes, Alvarez, Zumel, &c. ; of Mayro, Lychetus, 
Trombeta, Faber, Meurisse, Rada, &c. ; of Ruiz, 
Pennatus, Suarez, Vasquez, &c. ; of Hurtado, of 
Albertinus, of Lud. a Dola, and many others." 

Their studies did not lessen the ardour of their zeal. 
These were the men who were the ministers of our 
churches w4ien religious faith was most robust and 
when religious earnestness was most intense. It 
was the teaching of men like these that gave muscle 
and fibre to the religious life of the founders of New 
England. Among the early ministers of your own 
churches were men of the same masculine and noble 
type. They were great students as well as great 
preachers, and their studies helped their preaching. 

Some accounts have come down to us of the I 
personal habits of the men of those times. John 



LECT. IV.] THE PURITANS. 



Owen, during several years of his university life, 
allowed himself only four hours' sleep, but kept him- 
self in health and vigour by those athletic exercises 
which enabled him, when he was Vice-Chancellor of 
Oxford, to seize with his own hands a refractory 
student and carry him off to prison, to the amaze- 
ment of the gownsmen who were intending to effect 
a rescue. Edmund Calamy studied sixteen hours a 
day while chaplain to the Bishop of Ely, read Augus- 
tine through five times, and, among his other studies, 
mastered the immense literature which was created 
during the controversy between Bellarmine and his 
opponents. Matthew Poole, while preparing his 
" Synopsis," which occupied him ten years of his life, 
rose every morning between three and four o'clock, 
worked till eight or nine, when he ate a raw ^%g, 
worked on again till twelve o'clock, when his ascetic 
meal was repeated, and did not leave his desk till the 
afternoon was far advanced. In the evening we are 
told that he used to visit a friend and be very merry 
till supper, after which he turned the talk to grave and 
serious things, and then went home. Joseph Alleine, 
who died in Taunton Gaol, seems to have worked as 
hard as the rest. When he married, he received a 
letter of congratulation from an old college friend, 
who said that he had some thoughts of following his 
example, but wished to be wary, and would therefore 
take the freedom of asking him to describe the in- 
conveniences of a married life. Alleine replied : " Thou 
wouldst know the inconveniences of a wife, and I will 



112 **FOUR TEEN HO URS A DAY.*' [lect. i v. 

tell thee. First of all, whereas thou risest constantly 
at four in the morning, or before, she will keep thee 
till six ; secondly, whereas thou usest to study four- 
teen hours in the day, she will bring thee to eight or 
nine ; thirdly, whereas thou art wont to forbear one 
meal at least in the day for thy studies, she will bring 
thee to thy meat. If these are not mischief enough to 
affright thee, I know not what thou art." So that all 
the troubles of these studious men did not come from 
a persecuting Government. We might add a deeper 
pathos to the story of their sufferings and constancy 
by dilating with sympathetic eloquence on the sorrows 
which came on them from " those of their own house- 
holds," from wives who deprived them of their liberty 
to study fourteen hours a day and cruelly robbed them I 
of the joys of early rising. 

Do not be afraid that honest intellectual work will 
necessarily diminish your religious earnestness. But 
I think that you may be satisfied with something less 
than " fourteen hours a day," whether you have wives 
or not. No man will have a right to call you indolent 
if, when you become ministers, you really work for 
eight or nine hours a day. As you grow older, and 
the claims of pastoral and public duties become more 
exacting, you will have reason to be grateful if, by 
putting your wife at your study door, with a bayonet 
on her shoulder to protect you from all intruders, you 
can make sure of even six or seven. Nor is it 
the amount of time that a man spends in his study 
that measures the amount of real work that he gets 



LECT. IV. ] Z ORD L YTTON, 1 13 

through. Some men do as much in five hours as 
other men of equal natural ability do in eight. For a 
man who is to be a preacher it is of great importance 
that he should acquire the habit of commanding his 
whole intellectual force whenever he wants to use it. 
If, by exerting all your strength, you can get through 
a piece of work in an hour and a half, and get through 
it well, you are injuring yourselves by spending two 
hours over it. I do not mean, of course, that you 
should care for nothing except the " pace " at which 
you can work ; in trying for " pace " some men get 
" wild " and lose all their " form ; " but vigorous habits 
of study will contribute to a vigorous habit of thinking 
and speaking. 

There is an observation of the late Lord Lytton's 
which you will do well to remember while you are 
here, and which you may remember with advantage 
when you are in the ministry. In his judgment, 
" youths who are destined for active careers, or 
ambitious of distinction in such forms of literature as 
require freshness of invention or originality of thought, 
should avoid the habit of intense study for many hours 
at a stretch. There is a point in all tension of the 
intellect, beyond which effort is only a waste of 
strength. Fresh ideas do not readily spring up within 
a weary brain ; and whatever exhausts the mind, not 
only enf^eebles its power, but narrows its scope."i If 
any of you have been sunk into despair by what I have 
said about the enormous time which the Puritans 
^ " Caxtoniana," vol. ii. p. 327. 
9 



114 LORD LYTTON. [lect. iv. 

gave to their books, it may be a relief to you to hear 
another sentence of Lord Lytton's, which occurs very 
near to the passage I have quoted already : — " The 
man who has acquired the habit of study, though for 
only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the 
one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to 
see the way hq has made at the end of a twelve- 
month." I But remember that everything depends 
upon the regularity with which you work, and upon 
the perseverance and the vigour. 



NOTE TO PAGE 104. 

After Lecture IV. was in type, I remembered that there was 
a passage in Hazlitt in which the charm of Old Books is 
charmingly celebrated. I quote the passage for its own sake, 
and also because what I have written on the same subject may 
have been partly suggested by it. Hazlitt's choice of books 
does not, however, seem to me very admirable. 

" When I take up a work that I have read before (the oftener 
the better) I know what I have to expect. The satisfaction is 
not lessened by being anticipated. When the entertainment 
is altogether new, I sit down to it as I should to a strange 
dish — turn and pick out a bit here and there, and am in doubt 
what to think of the composition. There is a want of confidence 
and security to second appetite. New-fangled books are also 
like made-dishes in this respect, that they are generally little 
else than hashes and rifaccimeiiti of what has been served up 
entire and in a more natural state at other times. Besides, in 
thus turning to a well-known author, there is not only an 
assurance that my time will not be thrown away, or my palate 
nauseated with the most insipid or vilest trash, but I shake 
hands with, and look an old, tried, and valued friend in the face, 
compare notes, and chat the hours away. It is true, we form 

' " Caxtoniana/' vol. ii. p. 328. 



LECT. IV.] HAZLITT ON OLD BOOKS. 115 

dear friendships with such ideal guests, — dearer, alas ! and 
more lasting, than those with our most intimate acquaintance 
In reading a book which is an old favourite with me (say the 
first novel I ever read) I not only have the pleasure of imagina- 
tion, and of a critical rehsh of the work, but the pleasures of 
memory added to it. It recalls the same feelings and associations 
which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have 
again in any other way. Standard productions of this kind 
are links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind 
together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity. 
They are landmarks and guides in our journey through life. 
They are pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from 
which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral 
imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and 
records of our happiest hours. They are 'for thoughts and for 
remembrance.' They are like Fortunatus's Wishing-cap — they 
give us the best riches — those of fancy — and transport us, 
not over half the globe, but (which is better) over half our lives, 
at a word's notice. 

" My father Shandy solaced himself with Bruscambille. Give 
me for this purpose a volume of " Peregrine Pickle " or " Tom 
Jones." Open either of them anywhere — at the Memoirs of Lady 
Vane, or the adventures at the masquerade with Lady Bellaston, 
or the disputes between Thwackum and Square, or the escape of 
Molly Seagrim, or the incident of Sophia and her muff, or the 
edifying prolixity of her aunt's lecture — and there I find the 
same delightful, busy, busthng scene as ever, and feel myself the 
same as when I was first introduced into the midst of it." — 
Hazlitt : Table Talk. " On reading Old Books," pp. 310, 311. 



9* 



LECTURE V. 

THE PREPARATION OF SERMONS. 

GENTLEMEN,— When students for the ministry, 
or young preachers, have the opportunity of 
talking freely with a man who has been preaching 
for some years, they are almost certain to ask him 
what advice he can give them about the preparation 
of their sermons. In attempting to offer you some 
suggestions on this subject this afternoon, I do not 
think it necessary to begin by discussing the question 
whether it is better to preach extemporaneously, or to 
write your sermons and learn them, or to write them 
and read them ; for, even if you write, you ought to 
have a great part of your preparation finished before 
the first sentence is put on paper. Rousseau said 
that when writing a love-letter, " you should^ begin 
without knowing what you are going to say, and end 
without knowing what you have said." That seems 
to me an excellent way of writing love-letters — though, 
perhaps, I am too old, and have too little sentiment 
left in me, for my opinion on the matter to have any 
authority — but I am sure that it is a very bad way of 
writing sermons. 

I repeat that a great part of your preparation should 



I 



LECT. v.] ACCUMULATING MATERIAL. 117 

be finished before you begin to write ; and, indeed, 
if you are to economise time and to preach effectively, 
a great part of your preparation should be finished — 
if I may venture to say it — before you begin to pre- 
pare. Let me explain what I mean. 

I assume that you will read the Bible regularly — 
partly to master its contents for yourself, and partly 
to accumulate material for preaching. You will do 
well to read the Bible steadily through, but you should 
always have in hand some book which is likely to be 
fruitful in texts and topics for sermons. If, for in- 
stance, you give one half-hour in the morning to the 
Book of Numbers, you should give the next half-hour to 
one of the Gospels or one of the prophets ; for, judging 
from my own experience, the Book of Numbers does 
not suggest many subjects on which it is worth while 
to preach to a Christian congregation. If you are 
reading the Book of Joshua — although this book is 
thought by some excellent people to be exception- 
ally rich in spiritual truth, and to be " the especial 
heritage of this generation" — you will do wisely to 
turn from the land-surveying and the wars of Joshua 
to the Psalms of David, or to one of the Epistles of 
St. John or St. Paul. 

In reading the Bible for the purpose of accumulat- 
ing material for sermons, you will, of course, read it 
with all the exegetical aids you happen to possess — 
your lexicons, your Greek and Hebrew concordances, 
and the best commentaries you have on your shelves. 
In your ordinary reading, perhaps, you will not find 



ii8 ACCUMULATING MATERIAL, [lect. v. 

it of much use to read everything that half-a-dozen 
scholars have said on the book you are studying ; 
there is necessarily a large amount of matter which 
is common to them all, and you will get weary of 
reading the same things over and over again. Read 
all that has been written on the book by one man, 
and consult the rest on points about which he has not 
satisfied you. When you go through the same book 
again, take another commentator for your principal 
guide. But whatever help of this kind you obtain, do 
not be satisfied with determining the meaning of a 
contested passage as you determine a contested 
election — by taking the interpretation which has most 
votes : think your own way through the difficulty. 
A great name is a strong reason for giving careful 
consideration to the opinion which it covers ; but the 
greatest names can sometimes be alleged for opinions 
which are incredible. 

Reading in this way, you will supply your minds 
with the raw material which you have to work up in 
your sermons — not merely with texts. The substance 
of our preaching has been given to us in a Divine 
revelation. This revelation is recorded in the Holy 
Scriptures. For us, therefore, the Bible is not merely 
a book of texts, but a text-book. It contains the 
truths we have to teach, the laws which we have to 
illustrate in their relations to the lives of our people, 
the divine promises by which we are to console them 
in trouble and to strengthen their faith in the love 
and power of God. 



LECT. v.] ROUGH NOTES FOR SERMONS. 119 

Read the Bible, as well as other books, with your 
note-sheets at hand. Whenever you meet with any 
historical illustration of a vice or a folly to which men 
are still tempted in our own days, or any noble and 
pathetic example of virtue, devotion, and zeal ; when- 
ever you come across the statement of any truth 
concerning God, and His ways towards mankind, 
about which you have omitted to preach, or any moral 
precept on which' you have omitted to insist, or any 
bright and pleasant region of spiritual thought which 
is likely to give animation and vigour to a weary and 
sorrowful heart, make a note of it. Half an hour's 
reading will often give you the substance of three 
or four sermons. Instead of hunting for a text or a 
subject when Sunday is coming near, you will only 
have to turn to the drawer in which your notes are 
kept, and you will find a score of sermons half ready. 
Two or three sets of notes will sometimes run natu- 
rally together into one discourse, and in using them 
you will have hardly anything to do except to pre- 
pare an introduction and a conclusion. Sometimes 
such light and fire will suddenly flash out of a sentence 
or a phrase that a whole sermon will come to you at 
once, and you will be able to transfer to your notes 
the rough outline of an effective discourse. 

Your general reading and your theological reading 
may not be equally fruitful in subjects and materials 
for preaching, for the Bible is the great quarry of the 
preacher ; but even abstract theological speculations 
and controversies which have long been obsolete will 



120 ROUGH NOTES FOR SERMONS. [lect. v. 

sometimes originate lines of thought which will work 
easily and effectively into the plainest and most 
practical sermons. Always have your note-sheets on 
your desk. Whatever you are reading — theology, 
philosophy, history, poetry, fiction, biography, science 
— may at any moment give you something that will 
be of use in the pulpit. Sometimes you will get a 
subject for a sermon, sometimes a strong, epigram- 
matic statement of a great ethical truth which you 
will be glad to quote, sometimes a felicitous illustra- 
tion. Do not be satisfied with recording a mere 
reference to the page of the book where you have 
found anything that you mean to use, or with simply 
indicating the subject or the line of thought which the 
book has suggested. Develop the illustration so that 
it may be almost ready to be transferred to your 
sermon when you want it. Indicate in your " notes " 
briefly, but distinctly, how the subject, or the line 
of thought, which has occurred to you should be 
treated. Write out the sentence at length which you 
mean to quote, and as you write you will probably 
think of an effective " setting " for it — something will 
occur to you that will naturally lead up to it. 

It will also save you a great deal of trouble, and 
will help to preserve what I think Dr. Brooks called 
the " symmetry " of your preaching, if, at the begin- 
ning of the year, you draw up a list of a dozen or 
twenty subjects on which you think it desirable to 
preach before the year runs out. I shall have some- 
thing to say about this in another lecture ; for the 



II 



LECT. v.] CHOICE OF TOPICS. 121 

present I will only ask you to consider whether what 
I fear is the very common practice of leaving the 
choice of subjects to mere chance, is not one of the 
chief reasons of the inefficiency of preaching as a 
means of religious and ethical instruction. If we have 
a list of subjects such as I have suggested, and refer 
to it now and then, thoughts will gradually crystallise 
round one subject after another until we shall find 
that we have a number of sermons almost ready to 
our hand. 

In the choice of topics for sermons we should prefer 
those which in themselves have a strong moral and 
religious interest. Mr. Arnold's advice to a poet is 
worth remembering : — " I counsel him to choose for 
his subjects great actions ;" he does not deny " that 
the poetic faculty can and does manifest itself in treat- 
ing the most trifling action, the most hopeless subject." 
" But," he adds, " it is a pity that power should be 
wasted ; and that the poet should be compelled to 
impart interest and force to his subject, instead of 
receiving them from it, and thereby doubling his im- 
pressiveness. There is, it has been excellently said, 
an immortal strength in the stories of great actions : 
the most gifted poet, then, may well be glad to 
supplement with it that mortal weakness, which in 
presence of the vast spectacle of life and the world, 
he must for ever feel to be his individual portion." ' 
For the sake of the people, we are bound to choose 
subjects which stir the hearts of men and which touch 
^ Preiace to " Poems." Second edition, 1854. Page vii. 



122 MR. ARNOLD'S ADVICE TO POETS. [lect. v. 

the great duties, the great hopes and fears and sor- 
rows of human Hfe. For our own sakes, too, we 
should choose subjects of this kind. We are guilty of 
the most irrational conceit if we imagine that we shall 
be able, Sunday after Sunday, to invest with interest 
subjects which in themselves are uninteresting. 

The quotation I have just made from Mr. Arnold 
reminds me of a verse of his, containing " a caution to 
poets," which also suggests a caution to preachers. 

" What poets feel not, when they make, 
A pleasure in creating, 
The world in its turn will not take 
Pleasure in contemplating." ^ 

The application of this principle has its limits. I 
have already suggested the expediency of preparing 
a list of subjects at the beginning of the year, and you 
should make it a matter of conscience to exhaust the 
list during the year whether you feel any keen interest 
in the subjects or not. But your most effective sermons 
will be those in which you deal with aspects of truth 
and duty which have sovereign authority over your 
own life, which stir your imagination, fascinate your 
intellect, and inspire you with enthusiasm. If I may 
trust my own experience, we can hardly preach too 
often on any subject by which we ourselves are deeply 
moved. We may return to it Sunday after Sunday 
and month after month. As long as our own interest 
in it remains intense we shall preach about it in a way 
that will command the interest of our congregations. 
New Poems." 1867. Page 159. 



I u 



LECT. v.] DESPOTIC TRUTHS. 123 

Never be afraid of saying the same thing over and 
over again, if you feel driven to say it by a strong 
sense of its importance. I suppose that most preachers 
who have any Hfe and passion in them are under the 
benignant despotism of a succession of great truths 
and facts during successive periods of their ministry. 
For months they can hardly ever escape from the 
shadow and the glory of the death of the Lord Jesus 
Christ — the supreme crisis in the prolonged conflict 
between the righteousness and love of God and the 
sins and sorrows of the human race. Then, for months, 
the cross is almost forgotten, and the truth that the 
Christ who died is alive again, thrills them with a 
wonder and a joy as intense as the disciples felt 
when they first came to believe in the Resurrection. 
The freshness of this excitement passes away, and 
then, perhaps, they have a new and deeper sense of 
the awTul majesty of Christ as the Judge of all man- 
kind ; and for weeks or months together they have so 
solemn an impression of the final account which every 
man must give of the deeds done in the body, that it 
seems to them as if a truth had been revealed to them 
which the Church had forgotten for centuries. At one 
time the infinite mercy of God in forgiving our sins for 
Christ's sake fills their thoughts day and night ; at 
another they can think of nothing except the trans- 
cendent mystery of the life which is given to us in 
our regeneration ; after this, they are penetrated with 
wonder at the greatness of the triumphs which, through 
the power of the Holy Ghost, the CViristian man may 



124 CHOICE OF TEXTS. [lect v. 

achieve over sin ; and then, perhaps, come bright and 
peaceful months in which the hope of the glory, 
honour, and immortality which are our inheritance in 
Christ becomes so strong and clear that heaven and 
earth appear to touch, and the fair city of God, which 
was seen by St. John in vision, seems as though it 
had already become the home and rest of the soul. 

Now, I think it is quite safe to tell you that while 
you are " possessed " in this way by any great truth, 
you may preach about it again and again, and that the 
people will never get tired of listening to you. Only — 
remembering the great varieties of moral and spiritual 
conditions which exist in your congregation — you 
ought honestly to endeavour to interest yourself in 
other truths which may be necessary for the complete 
education and discipline of their moral and spiritual 
life. 

I have spoken of the choice of " subjects " and of 
the choice of "texts ; " but a text, if honestly selected, 
contains the subject on which you intend to preach, 
or, at least, fairly and naturally suggests the subject. 
To treat a text as a mere motto for a sermon is a 
practice which can very rarely be justified. If a 
minister does not intend to preach about what the 
text teaches or implies, he had better take no text 
at all. Whether it would be wise for you to do this 
must be determined by your own good sense. I do it 
myself occasionally, but I have been the minister of 
the same congregation for nearly five and twenty 
years, and can set aside the traditions of the pulpit 



LECT. v.] CHOICE OF TEXTS. 125 

without giving any offence. It may be that some 
congregations would not concede to a young preacher 
the same Hberty. 

When you take a text be sure that it is in the 
Bible. A friend of mine now dead — a very eminent 
preacher — once made what has been described to me 
as a very fine sermon on some words which he ima- 
gined were in the Book of Proverbs. On Sunday 
morning, before starting for church, he thought that it 
would be as well if he looked up the chapter in which 
he supposed that the words occurred. To his dismay 
the words were not to be found. He turned to his 
" Cruden," but Cruden failed him. He was still con- 
fident that the words were in the Book of Proverbs, 
and when the critical moment came for beginning to 
preach, he began by saying something to this effect : 
" You will remember, my friends, the words of the 
wisest of kings " — then he quoted his text and glided 
into his sermon as if he had innocently forgotten to 
say where the words of the wisest of kings occurred. 
Many a child in the congregation that afternoon 
hunted in vain through the Book of Proverbs and the 
Book of Ecclesiastes to discover the text of the morn- 
ing's sermon. I think that my friend would have done 
better if he had warned the people that though he 
thought the words were Solomon's, he had not been 
able to find them, even with the help of a concordance. 
He discovered afterwards, I think, that the words 
were in one of the collects or prayers of the Anglican 
Prayer-book. 



126 CHOICE OF TEXTS. [lect. v. 

But it was not to warn you against accidents of 
this kind that I said you should make sure that your 
text is in the Bible. The text may be printed in our 
English version of the Holy Scriptures, and yet nothing 
corresponding to it may ever have been written by the 
hand of a Jewish scribe or of a Christian evangelist or 
apostle. It may stand for a corrupt reading which 
criticism has cancelled or modified ; or it may be a 
false translation of the Hebrew or Greek. In either 
case the text is not really in the Bible at all, and if 
you treat it as though its integrity could not be chal- 
lenged, you are not dealing fairly with your congre- 
gation. 

Some preachers choose texts with apparently no 
other purpose than to display their owii wonderful 
ingenuity. It is, no doubt, possible for a man to 
preach a very pathetic and earnest sermon on the 
words in Ezra i. 9 : " nine and twenty knives," or on 
the description of the bedstead of Og king of Bashan, 
in Deut. iii. 11," his bedstead was a bedstead of iron ; 
is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon } nine 
cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the 
breadth of it, after the cubit of a man." i But when 
I hear a man announce a text of this sort and watch 
the process by which he develops from it the doctrine 
of Justification by Faith, or the necessity of Regener- 

I By way of caution to any of my young readers who may be 
enamoured of either of these texts, it may be as well to say that 
the " iron " of Og.'s bedstead was probably black basalt, and the 
" bedstead " a sarcophagus ; and that it is very doubtful whether 
Ezra's "knives" were knives at all. 



LECT. v.] CHOICE OF TEXTS. 127 

ation, or a theory of Divine Providence, or some in- 
teresting speculations on the millennium or the future 
blessedness of the righteous — and a sermon on '' nine 
and twenty knives," or on Og's iron bedstead, may 
cover any one of these subjects as well as another — I 
always think of the tricks of those ingenious gentle- 
men who entertain the public by rubbing a sovereign 
-between their hands till it becomes a canary, and 
drawing out of their coat sleeves half-a-dozen brilliant 
glass globes filled with water, and with four or five 
gold fish swimming in each of them. For myself, I 
like to listen to a good preacher, and I have no objec- 
tion in the world to be amused by the tricks of a clever 
conjurer ; but I prefer to keep the conjuring and the 
preaching separate : conjuring on Sunday morning, 
conjuring in church, conjuring with texts of Scripture, 
is not quite to my taste. 

On the other hand there is considerable risk in choos- 
ing a text in which a great truth is stated with such 
sublimity and grandeur, or in which the deeper spiritual 
affections are expressed with such vehemence and 
energy, or in which there is so powerful an appeal to 
the imagination, that the text creates expectations 
which the sermon cannot fulfil. What can any man 
say after reading the words of St. John, " God is 
love " } What kind of a sermon do you lead your 
congregation to anticipate if you announce as your 
text the last two verses of the eighth chapter of the 
Epistle to the Romans," I am persuaded, that neither 
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 



128 CHOICE OF TEXTS. [lect. v. 

powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor 
height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be 
able to separate us from the love of God which is 
in Christ Jesus our Lord " ? What power of lyrical 
eloquence ought a preacher to have who ventures to 
write a sermon on Luke ii. 13, 14, " Suddenly there 
was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, 
praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, 
and on earth peace, good will toward men " ? 

There are texts of another kind, which I think are 
likely to disappoint us if we attempt to preach upon 
them, I remember hearing a sermon on the words, 
" We all do fade as a leaf" The little chapel in which 
it was delivered was in the Lake country : the fern on 
the hills and the woods below were taking their 
autumn tints of brown and gold. It was only neces- 
sary to step outside, and the beautiful country was a 
far more perfect and affecting sermon on the text than 
any mortal lips could deliver. For five or ten minutes, 
however, the preacher, who w^as a lady, succeeded ad- 
mirably. She had caught the sentiment of the text, 
and her quiet gentle manner w^as in harmony wdth 
the pathos of her words. But then the vein was 
worked out, and the rest of the sermon was a series of 
colourless commonplaces. This was not the preacher's 
fault. The beauty and pathetic power of the text are 
derived from the perfection of the poetical form in 
which the brevity and decay of human liie and 
strength and glory are expressed. A sermon on a 
text like that should be a prose poem, but the theme 



I 



LECT. v.] CHOICE OF TEXTS. 129 

hardly admits of sufficient variations to permit the 
poem to extend to the ordinary length of a sermion. 
I doubt whether any poet could preserve the tone 
and sentiment of the original idea through a hundred 
lines, or even through fifty. 

Are passages of this kind to be set aside by the 
preacher as usele^.s ? Is he never to avail himself in 
the pulpit of the m^st sublime, the most animating, 
the most touching, the most beautiful words of 
prophets, psalmists, and apostles ? You can hardly 
imagine that I mean to offer you such discouraging 
advice as this. 

The true course, as I venture to think, is obvious. 
Passages which we hardly dare to take as texts may 
contribute to our sermons their most effective and 
impressive lines of thought. Had the lady preacher 
of whom I was speaking just now, selected as the text 
of her sermon some passage in which the frailty 
of man is expressed with less poetic beauty, she 
might have gradually prepared her congregation for 
the striking and pathetic reflections which had occurred 
to her on the words — " We all do fade as a leaf" 
And so, if your imagination is excited by any of the 
details in St. John's description of the New Jerusalem ; 
if you have taken fire at the words, " the street of 
the city was pure gold," and " the twelve gates were 
twelv^e pearls ; " or if some bright and pleasant fancies 
have clustered round the beautiful words in an earlier 
chapter of the same book — "there was a rainbow 
round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald " 

10 



I30 CHOICE OF TEXTS. [lect. v. 

— although I think that it would be perilous to take 
any of these words as the text of a sermon, there 
is no need that your thoughts about them should be 
wasted. Take some quieter and less dazzling words 
as a text, and gradually work your way to the beauty 
and glory which you have found in these imaginative 
passages. 

The great and noble texts of which I was speaking 
just ROW — texts which contain a promise too large for 
any sermon to fulfil — may be dealt with in the same 
way. If they have moved your own heart deeply, if 
they have given you vigorous and lofty thoughts, 
which you are eager to use, take a text which excites 
less expectation, and so construct your sermon that it 
shall gradually lead up to the heights of truth, to the 
exulting hopes, the glowing passion with which your 
soul has been thrilled. 

These suggestions are, of course, not intended as 
an inflexible law. There are occasions on which we 
may preach on the most glorious passages which are 
to be found in the Old Testament or the New ; there 
are moods in which no words are too pathetic or too 
animating or too startling for us to preach about 
them ; but as a rule I think it is safe to avoid texts 
that are very sublime, very, striking, or very remark- 
able for their imaginative beauty. 

When you have chosen your text and your topic, 
how are you to begin to prepare ? If your " notes " 
serve you well, you will already have in hand a 
considerable amount of material ; but whether you 



LECT. v.] BOW TO BEGIN TO PREPARE. 13 1 



have little or much, you should first of all come to a 
clear understanding with yourself about the precise 
object of your sermon. 

What is the sermon to do? The answer to this 
question determines the whole method of preparation. 

Is it your principal intention to prove some Christian 
doctrine, to support the teaching of a particular text 
by appealing to the concurrent authority of other 
parts of Holy Scripture ? — then your line of prepara- 
tion is clear. If you do not happen to have in hand, 
as the result of your previous studies, an organised 
statement of the Scripture evidence — direct and in- 
direct — of the truth on which you are about to preach, 
you must rely on your general knowledge of the 
contents of the Bible, and you must hunt up the 
proofs you want, and carefully verify them. 

Is it your intention to state and explain some truth 
which you have reason to suppose is not generally 
understood ? Then you may be greatly helped by 
thinking of two or three members of your congrega- 
tion who are least likely to understand it, and you 
should consider by what lines of thought and by what 
class of illustrations you would be able to make the 
truth clear to them if you were talking to them in 
private. If in your congregation there are persons 
who have grave misconceptions of the truth, you will 
be tempted to begin by attacking and exposing what 
you suppose to be their mistakes. This is the easy 
way of trying to set them right, but it is not the 
effective way. Men will not part with what they have, 

10 * 



132 WHAT IS THE SERMON TO DO? [lect. v. 

until you give them something better. The attack 
provokes defence. Most people are very unwilling to 
find out for themselves that they have been in the 
wrong ; they are still more unwilling to let any one 
else prove to them that they have been in the wrong. 
Develop your own conception of the truth first — not 
aggressively, with your teeth set, your hand clenched, 
and your war-paint on; but quietly and modestly. 
Consider what kind of proof will satisfy the minds 
of those who are least likely to accept your teaching ; 
look for illustrations that shall be adjusted to their 
temper and habits ; try to discover how you can 
secure for your own position the moral and religious 
sympathies of those who are intellectually opposed 
to it ; make some practical and manifestly wholesome 
application of point after point as your thought moves 
on ; and you will find that a sermon is gradually 
growing which will make the truth plain to those 
who had not understood it at all, and will correct the 
mistakes of those who had formed a false conception 
of it. 

Perhaps your principal object is practical ; you 
want to get the people to discharge some duty which 
they neglect, or to break with some sin. If you have 
reason to believe that they have no clear understand- 
ing of the nature of the duty, or that they do not 
believe that the sin is forbidden by the law of Christ, 
your first endeavour must be to instruct their con- 
sciences ; and until the necessary instruction has been 
given, your appeals and warnings, no matter how 



LECT. v.] WHAT IS TEE SERMON TO DO? 133 

solemn, vehement, and passionate, will have no effect. 
You will then consider what motives will most power- 
fully influence the particular class of persons who are 
neglecting the duty on which you are insisting, or 
who are committing the positive sin from which you 
are trying, with God's good help, to rescue them. 

Or your intention may be to strengthen some reli- 
gious affection, to confirm the trust of your congrega- 
tion in God's infinite mercy, to deepen their reverence 
for the Divine Majesty, to give them nobler conceptions 
of the power and glory of God, to alleviate sorrow 
and anxiety by confirming their faith in the com- 
passion and pity of Him who knoweth our frame, 
and remembereth that we are dust ; or you want to 
inspire their zeal for the kingdom of Christ with nev/ 
fervour ; or to give larger breadth and greater tender- 
ness to their Christian charity. If this is your object, 
you will not be looking vaguely to the right and to 
the left for any original and brilliant and eloquent 
things which your subject may happen to suggest ; 
but you will consider how the subject on which you 
are intending to preach can be presented so as to pro- 
duce the definite impression which you desire. 

The general principle which I have been trying to 
illustrate is very simple and very obvious ; it is one of 
those commonplaces which I told you were to make 
up the whole substance of this course of lectures ; 
but precisely because it is a commonplace I attach 
great importance to it. I believe that many young 
preachers, when they sit down to prepare a sermon, 



134 HAVE A DEFINITE OBJECT. [lect. v. 

Start like Abraham, who "went out, not knowing 
whither he went." Or perhaps it would be truer to 
say that for half an hour or an hour they do not start 
at all, but look idly round their subject, and wonder 
whether they will be able to make anything of it. At 
last, by some accident, they find what looks like a 
path, and after trying it they find that it leads nowhere, 
and so they come back to the place where they began. 
The preacher who has a definite end to reach, rarely 
loses any of the time which he gives to preparation ; 
he sees in the distance the point to which he has to 
travel, and he either finds or makes a road to it. 

I wonder whether you know anything on this side 
of the Atlantic of the terrible difficulty which we Eng- 
lishmen experience in thinking of something to say 
when we are making a formal call on persons who are 
almost strangers to us. If I may judge from the 
Americans whom it has been my pleasure to meet in 
different parts of the world, you have far greater 
freedom and vivacity and inventiveness in conversa- 
tion than we have, and, perhaps, the difficulty to which 
I am referring never troubles you. We open the con- 
versation, as a matter of course, by talking of the 
weather. We inform the lady or gentleman on whom 
we are calling that there has been a great deal of rain, 
or that the east wind is very trying, or that the un- 
usual dryness of the season has made the dust ex- 
tremely unpleasant. Then we begin to feel a little 
nervous, and wonder what we shall say next. We 
think ourselves very fortunate if we happen to dis- 



LECT. v.] AN ENGLISHM Airs DIFFICULTY. 135 

cover that the lady was at a concert the night before, 
or that the gentleman is going to Scotland the next 
day. We are still more happy if we learn that either 
of them has been suffering from toothache for a fort- 
night, so that we can dilate on the dexterity of our 
favourite dentist ; or if we discover that one of the 
young gentlemen of the house has lately had an ac- 
cident with his bicycle and broken his leg, or that he 
fell into the river a week ago and was half drowned. 
Then we can get on merrily enough till the time comes 
when we can with decency rise to go. If none of 
these fruitful subjects offer themselves we soon become 
very miserable, and we sympathise keenly with Anna 
Gascoigne in " Daniel Deronda," who said, " I am not at 
all clever, and I never know what to say. It seems so 
useless to say what everybody knows, and I can think 
of nothing else, except what papa says." 

But if we wish to secure some definite object, the 
difficulty of " making conversation " vanishes at once. 
If we want to persuade the lady to join a musical 
society, or to become one of the patronesses of a 
flower show ; if we want the gentleman to vote for 
the Liberal candidate for the borough, or to go on 
the committee of a hospital, or to become a member 
of a new club, or to subscribe a couple of guineas a 
year to an orphan asylum, we have plenty to say, 
especially if there is any hesitation to be overcome, 
or if there are any misconceptions to be corrected. It 
is also true that while a preacher who simply wants to 
find something good and sensible to say to his con- 



136 THE ''PLAN." [lect. v. 

gregation for half an hour or forty minutes, may be 
driven to his wits' ends to think of anything that is 
worth saying, a preacher who wants to get them to 
understand something which they do not understand 
clearly, or to do something, or to leave something 
undone, will find that the object he wants to gain will 
suggest what he ought to say, and the difficulty of 
preparing a sermon will be greatly lightened. 

You have noticed, perhaps, that I have said nothing 
about preparing " the plan " of the sermon, or what 
in some books on preaching is grimly called " the 
skeleton." Some preachers begin with their " plan." 
They think that it is their first business to " divide " 
their subject or their text ; and having constructed 
their divisions, they fill them up as best they can.« 
When I was at college we had each to read a sermon 
in class about twice in the session ; but we had to 
prepare " plans " — with divisions and subdivisions — 
about once in three weeks. A sermon might take 
three or four evenings to prepare ; but a " plan " was 
not supposed to take more than half an hour, and I 
suspect that many a plan was thrown off in five 
minutes. If the " plan " looked promising it was 
sometimes developed into a sermon. I have heard 
that it is the custom in some colleges for the homi- 
letical professor to announce a text, and to require the 
students of his class in turn to give him, off-hand, the 
plan of a sermon upon it. Whether any practice of 
this kind exists at Yale I do not know. If it does, I 
have no doubt that your professor could give you 



LECT. v.] THE ''plan:' 137 



excellent reasons for it as a class exercise. But it is 
my impression that the habit of making the " plan " 
of a sermon first and getting the materials afterwards 
is likely to have an injurious effect on a man's preach- 
ing. The " plan " of a sermon is the order in which 
the materials are arranged, and it seems to me that 
the reasonable method is to arrange the materials 
when you have got them to arrange — not before. 

When you are about to build a house, you tell your 
architect what you want — how large the dining-room 
and the drawing-room must be, what kind of a library 
he must give you, and what aspect you would like 
these rooms to have ; and you tell him how many 
bedrooms you want. When he knows for what he 
has to arrange, he prepares his plans and his elevation ; 
and, if he understands his profession, his plans and 
elevation are governed by the number and size and 
uses of the rooms which are required. It is this 
which makes one of the chief differences between 
good and bad architecture, between architecture which 
is dead and formal, and architecture which has life, 
freedom, and vigour in it. A poor architect designs 
the outside of his building first, prepares his ground- 
plan and elevation, and then does the best he can in 
arranging the interior. A good architect begins with 
the inside: asks, first of all, what the contents of the 
building are to be, and lets these determine everything. 
I think that there is a similar difference between good 
and bad architecture in sermons. Make your " plan " 
first, and your sermon is in great danger of being 



138 THE '' plan:' [lect. v. 

formal ; you will have to exclude some of the best 
materials that come to you ; or you will fling them 
down into the Introduction, because there is no place 
for them anywhere else, just as we are in the habit of 
leaving our heavy luggage in the hall of an hotel, be- 
cause we cannot get it into the bedrooms. 

In building a house, an architect is sometimes under 
restraints which prevent him from working on what 
he knows is the right principle. If the house is to 
stand in a row, he may be obliged to make the outside 
of it precisely like the outside of the houses that stand 
to the right and to the left of it. He has no scope for 
his genius. Formality is his doom, and he must sub- 
mit to it. But a preacher is under no such restraints. 
Every sermon stands by itself, in its own grounds, and 
may be built just as the preacher pleases. If the ser- 
mon is full of sentiment and fancy, it may be a plea- 
sant cottage, with lawns and flower gardens round it, 
and with windows open to the sun and air, and with 
roses and honeysuckles growing about the porch. If 
it is an attack on some grave speculative error or 
on some evil practice, it may be a fort with walls of 
granite, pierced here and there for a rifle to be thrust 
through, defended by earthworks, and mounted with 
heavy guns. The mischief is that some preachers 
build all their sermons as though they were to stand 
side by side in a street, and as though it were neces- 
sary to make the front of number 264 precisely the 
same as the front of number 265. Whatever there 
may be inside, the outside conforms to an almost 



LECT. V.J HAVE 7 wo ' ' PLANS. " 1 39 

invariable model. The door is always in the same 
place, the rows of windows are faultlessly uniform, 
there is the same number of floors in every one of 
them between the foundation and the roof — three 
principal divisions, with three sub-divisions under 
each, and then an application : they are all nine- 
roomed houses, with attics on the top. This comes, 
I think, of making the plan first. 

There is another evil which is incident to this prac- 
tice. Having made your plan, you have then to fill 
up every one of the little logical or rhetorical squares 
with argument, sentiment, explanation, or appeal. 
Your thinking is done " to order," and the result is 
not likely to be very satisfactory. The work is almost 
certain to be uneven. Some of the thought will be 
forced and some will be tame. Your most vigorous 
thinking will perhaps come in your first division, and 
the rest of the sermon will be weak and ineffective. 
You should have two plans : the first, a plan to guide 
your own thought while accumulating your material ; 
the second, a plan for arranging the material when 
you have accumulated it. 

Should the divisions of the second plan be an- 
nounced } In England most Nonconformist preachers 
always announce what are sometimes called the 
" heads " of their sermons. Among the clergy of the 
Established Church I believe that the practice is less 
common. When the sermon is mainly didactic, when 
it consists of a series of motives to enforce some duty, 
or of a carefully organised procession of proofs in 



I40 ON ANNOUNCING DIVISIONS. [lect. v. 

support of some doctrinal or ethical proposition, the 
announcement of the divisions will probably help your 
congregation to understand and to remember what 
you are saying. But I see no more reason for always 
announcing the divisions of a sermon than for always 
announcing the divisions of a speech. If the thoughts 
of the sermon are well massed, if land and water, 
earth and sky, are definitely separated from each other, 
instead of being left in the confusion of chaos, the 
sermon will be effective at the time, and the main 
points of it will be remembered afterwards, whether 
the divisions are announced or not. 

There are some obvious disadvantages in announc- 
ing them. The sermon is in danger of becoming a 
series of short sermons, with the divisions for separate 
texts ; and there is sometimes a great deal of trouble 
in making a natural and easy transition from one di- 
vision to another. 

If the " heads " are announced it will sometimes be 
expedient to announce them at the close of the succes- 
sive parts of the sermon to which they belong, instead 
of at the beginning. A few months ago I heard this 
done very effectively by one of the most eloquent of 
the High Anglican clergy — Mr. Body. He was 
preaching on a well-known text in Isaiah : " It shall 
come to pass in the last days that the mountain 
of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of 
the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills ; 
and all nations shall flow unto it." His subject was 
the Power of the Church. In his Introduction, after a 



LECT. v.] A SERMON OF MR. BODY'S. 141 

rather fanciful exposition of the text, he gave a glow- 
ing description of the triumphs which the Christian 
Church has already won over the hearts and lives of 
mankind. He effected his transition to the main ar- 
gument of his discourse by asking, How have these 
triumphs been won ? What is the secret of this force 
which enables the Church to subdue men of every 
race and of every variety of culture and civilisation ? 
To these questions he replied by another, What is it 
that men chiefly need ? Then followed a series of 
very vivid illustrations of the universal consciousness 
of guilt. And is mercy possible } Yes, he answered. 
God has come from heaven to earth to atone for the 
sins of men. He then gave a noble and pathetic 
statement of the doctrine of the Atonement — an 
atonement effected for all men, in all countries, and 
all ages. But to make known to mankind the infinite 
mercy of God revealed through Christ is one of the 
chief functions of the Church. Her message is received 
with wonder and joy, the sinful are drawn to her feet. 
Th^ first element therefore of the Church's power is 
this — She is Evangelical. But when the soul has 
learnt to trust in Christ for the pardon of sin, it is 
eager, he said, to learn all that can be known about 
God and about the will of God. What shall it believe .? 
Can any of the sects, he asked, reply to that question 
with confidence 1 He told us that men whose love for 
Christ seems equally fervent teach conflicting doctrines, 
and differ as to the authority and meaning of the 
sacred rites of the Christian faith. The Independent 



142 A SERMON OF MR. BODY'S. [lect. v. 

agrees with the Church as to the perpetual obHgation 
of Infant Baptism and the Lord's Supper ; the Baptist 
refuses to baptise infants ; the members of the Society 
of Friends will baptise neither infants nor adults, nor 
will they celebrate the Lord's Supper. This line of 
observation was developed with great vivacity, but 
with great kindliness ; and then he reminded us of 
the Church, with its ancient creeds, and of the authority 
with which it claims to speak as the living representa- 
tive of the great Society founded by Christ and His 
apostles. He closed this part of the sermon by say- 
ing that the second element of the power of the Church 
is this — She is Dogmatic. The rest of the sermon it 
is unnecessary to quote. 

This method has the advantage of stimulating 
and suspending curiosity. When a preacher begins 
by announcing the proposition which he intends to 
prove or to illustrate, the congregation will generally 
see a straight piece of road before them, and will feel 
that their attention may be relaxed till the next turn 
comes. Sometimes, however, the proposition will be 
misunderstood, sometimes it will provoke antagonism. 
The misunderstanding will be obviated if the illustra- 
tion comes first and the proposition afterwards ; and 
if the proof is given before the proposition is stated, 
the antagonism may not arise. 

But no general rule can be given. A preacher may 
sometimes see that he will excite curiosity by stating 
his divisions before explaining, proving, or enforcing 
them. We must judge for ourselves. What I am 
anxious to contend for is variety and freedom. 



LECT. v.] REVIEWING PREPARATION. 143 

When you have got your materials together and 
arranged them, I think you should ask whether your 
sermon will contain an adequate amount of positive 
Christian truth ; whether what you have prepared 
is governed and inspired by a recognition of the true 
relations of the human race to God as those relations 
are illustrated in the revelation which has been made 
to us through Christ ; whether your sermon will satisfy 
the apostolic conception of what the preaching of 
the gospel ought to be ; whether it is likely to secure 
any of the great ends for which the Christian ministry 
is established, and the particular end which you had 
proposed to yourself in preparing it ; whether you are 
leaving anything unsaid that as a Christian preacher 
you are bound to say ; whether the spirit of the sermon 
will be in harmony with the mind of Christ. 

You may then look at your materials from another 
point of view. Is the sermon likely to be monotonous 
in tone and colour .? Will it be sufficiently varied to 
be interesting to all sorts of people 1 You may con- 
sider whether the subject has any pathetic aspects 
which you have overlooked ; whether you have brought 
it into a sufficiently close relation to the conscience 
and to the common lives of men ; whether, with the 
materials you have prepared, the subject will be lit 
up with imagination or fancy ; whether there will be 
a sufficient glow of feeling. 

Do not suppose that I mean you to manufacture 
an imaginative paragraph, or a pathetic paragraph, or 
a humorous paragraph : to do this will make your 



144 REVIEWING PREPARATION. [lect. v. 

sermon very false and artificial. But to secure interest 
and effectiveness, you ought to try to appeal to as 
many elements of human nature as possible ; and in 
looking through your rough notes you will sometimes 
find that there are the germs of imaginative, pathetic, 
impassioned, or humorous passages which you have 
omitted to develop, and which might be developed 
with great advantage. 

In this review of what you have prepared you will 
make sure of saying — and saying clearly — the main 
thing about your subject that ought to be said and 
that you want to say. Dr. Duncan — Rabbi Duncan 
— after listening to a sermon, declared that " the idea 
of the preacher was in the sentence after the last." 

You will then consider what ought to be said in 
your Introduction, unless, indeed, you believe with 
Pascal, who I am inclined to think was right, that 
" the last thing a man finds out when he is writing a 
book is how to begin," and in that case you will post- 
pone preparing the Introduction until you have deter- 
mined how the sermon is to end. 

The Introduction is one of the great perplexities of 
young preachers. Very often they spend an amount of 
strength upon it which would be far better used later 
in the sermon. The style and size of the porch ought 
to bear some proportion to the style and size of the 
house. My late friend M. de Felice, one of the most 
eminent of modern preachers among the Protestants 
of France, once said to a colleague of his, M. Pedezert, 
" I want half an hour's preliminary conversation with 



LECT. v.] THE INTRODUCTION. 145 

my hearers." " Then/' replied M. Pedezert, " you 
begin just when others are finishing." M. de FeHce, 
I beHeve, generally preached for an hour and a half. 
Even in his case, half an hour's " preliminary conver- 
sation," in the shape of an elaborate Introduction, was 
a sufficiently serious encroachment on the time at his 
disposal ; but for a man who preaches for only five 
and thirty minutes to have an Introduction of a quarter 
of an hour, is a far graver mistake. In listening to 
the ostentatious preparations which some preachers 
think it necessary to make before they fairly get into 
their sermon, which too often proves to be a very 
poor one after all, one is inclined to ask, in the words 
of Robert Browning — 

" But why such long prolusion and display, 
Such turning and adjustment of the harp ; 
And taking it upon your breast at length, 
Only to speak dry words across its strings ? " 

The Introduction should be as brief as possible. As 
a rule, it should spring directly and naturally out of 
the text ; that is, if the text is announced first. If 
you want to say something before you refer to your 
text, keep back your text till you have said it. But 
the best advice I can give you is to get to work as 
soon as you can. If your text requires explanation, 
explain it ; if not, do not waste your time by explain- 
ing it. 

The time which most young preachers devote to 
the preparation of the Introduction would be far 
better spent on the close, or what our fathers used 

II 



146 THE '' application:' [lect. v. 

to call the Application, of their sermons. About this 
all authorities are agreed. An English preacher of the 
last generation used to say that he cared very little 
what he said the first half-hour, but that he cared a 
very great deal what he said the last fifteen minutes. 
I remember reading many years ago an address de- 
livered to students by Mr. Henry Ward Beecher, in 
which he gave a very striking account of the sermons 
of Jonathan Edwards. Mr. Beecher said that in the 
elaborate doctrinal part of Jonathan Edwards's ser- 
mons the great preacher was only getting his guns 
into position ; but that in his " applications " he opened 
fire on the enemy. There are too many of us, I am 
afraid, who take so much time in getting our guns 
" into position," that we have to finish without firing a 
shot. We say that we leave the truth to do its own 
work. We trust to the hearts and consciences of our 
hearers to "apply it." Depend upon it, gentlemen, 
this is a great and fatal mistake. 

Sometimes, indeed, we may preach a sermon which 
is " application " from the first sentence to the last, as 
an eloquent friend of mine once delivered a speech an 
hour long, which was enthusiastically described as " all 
peroration." Mr. Finney's sermons were not unfre- 
quently of this kind. I do not mean that he " per- 
orated " all through, but that the whole sermon was 
"application." I heard him very often during his 
visit to England when I was a student, and it seemed 
to me that the iron chain of the elaborate theological 
argument which sometimes constituted the substance 



LECT. v.] THE '' APPLICATION*' 147 

of his discourse — an argument on Free Will, or on the 
Evil of Sin, or on the Moral Necessity which obliged 
God to punish Sin — was fastened to an electric bat- 
tery : every link of the chain as you touched it gave 
you a moral shock ; but even in Mr. Finney's sermons 
the supreme impression usually came at the end ; the 
effect was cumulative. 

The principle on which the closing passages of 
our sermons should be prepared is obvious. Having 
demonstrated some Christian truth, or having ex- 
plained some Christian duty, we have to ask ourselves 
how we can project the truth into the very depths of the 
thought and life of our congregation, so that they shall 
never lose it ; how we can constrain them to discharge 
the duty. We may secure these ends in many ways. 
Even if our principal object is to set or keep the 
faith of the people right, the truth will be most 
firmly enthroned in the intellect if we invoke the 
alliance of the conscience and of the spiritual affec- 
tions, or if we exhort the people to the discharge of 
the special duty which the truth imposes upon all who 
receive it. Sometimes, on the other hand, the living 
authority of the truth will be felt most vividly, and 
its shining glory will be most clearly seen, if it is 
suddenly contrasted with the antagonistic error. Or 
if it is our object to strengthen the religious affections 
— the gratitude, the love, the trust, the hope, the joy^ 
which the truth inspires — we may often succeed hy 
giving free expression to the feeling and passion which 
the truth has enkindled in our own hearts. If we are 

II * 



148 THE '' application:' [lect. v. 

enforcing a duty, we may crown all that we have said 
by some vivid historical illustration of the beauty and 
nobleness of the particular excellence on which we are 
insisting, or of the shamefulness and baseness of the 
opposite vice. Or we may give heart and courage to 
those who may think that the duty is above their 
strength, by recalling with exulting confidence the 
great promises of God. Or we may appeal to fear or 
to hope, or to the authority of Christ, which no Chris- 
tian heart can resist. We shall do well to study the 
various methods which successful preachers have fol- 
lowed in this part of their sermons. Original methods 
of reaching the heart and the conscience and influencing 
the will are of far more value to a preacher who wants 
to do his work well than originality of any other kind. 
There are one or two suggestions of a general 
character which I should like to offer before I close. 

Never be afraid of making your explanations of any 
truth, or fact, or duty, too simple and elementary. One 
of the most charming popular preachers and speakers 
that I ev^er knew, said to me once that he always took it 
for granted that the people knew nothing about the sub- 
ject on which he was speaking to them. A few months 
ago, in a passage of a great speech on the Eastern Ques- 
tion delivered at Birmingham, Mr. John Bright showed 
that, consciously or unconsciously, he spoke on the 
same principle. He explained the precise position of 
Constantinople on the Bosphorus, and described the 
Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles. I did not 
happen to be in Birmingham when the speech was 



LECT. V.J MR. BRIGHT. 149 

delivered, and while reading it in a railway carriage in 
the north of England the next morning, I wondered 
whether for once Mr. Bright's oratorical instinct had 
failed him, and whether the audience had showed any 
signs of impatience while they were listening to this 
elementary information. When I got home my friends 
told me that this passage of the speech was listened 
to with the closest attention. Mr. Bright was right, 
as usual, and he had gi\'en me another illustration, in 
addition to the innumerable illustrations which he had 
given me before, of the true method of addressing 
great audiences. 

The thoughts of ordinary men on most things not 
connected with their own profession are very inde- 
finite. Large numbers of persons, who have been 
accustomed to read the Bible and to listen to preach- 
ing all their lives, have the loosest possible acquaint- 
ance with the details of biblical history, and their 
conceptions of doctrinal truth are extremely vague. 
They are grateful to any man who will make their 
knowledge of the external facts of Holy Scripture 
definite, and who will give sharpness and firmness to 
the outlines of their conceptions of truth. 

Young preachers are afraid to say the same thing 
over and over again. Mr. Finney, in his Auto- 
biography, quotes what a judge in your Supreme 
Court once said to him on this subject, and it 
deserves your careful consideration. " Ministers," he 
said, " do not exercise good sense in addressing the 
people. They are afraid of repetition. Now, if 



150 THE ADVICE OF A JUDGE. [lect. v. 

lawyers should take such a course, they would ruin 
themselves and their cause. When I was at the bar," 
he added, " I used to take it for granted, when I had 
before me a jury of respectable men, that I should 
have to repeat over my main positions about as many 
times as there were persons in the jury-box. I learned 
that unless I did so, illustrated, and repeated, and 
turned the main points over — the main points of law 
and of evidence — I should lose my cause." ^ The 
judge was right. We should all preach more effec- 
tively if, instead of tasking our intellectual resources 
to say a great many things in the same sermon, we 
tried to say a very few things in a great many ways, 
I " Finney's Autobiography," p. 85. 



LECTURE VI. 

EXTEMPORANEOUS PREACHING AND STYLE. 

GENTLEMEN,— About the comparative advan- 
tages of preaching from a manuscript and 
preaching extemporaneously, I have some difficulty 
in speaking. It seems to me that the overwhelming 
weight of the argument is on the side of extempo- 
raneous preaching ; but I have very rarely the courage 
to go into the pulpit without carrying with me the 
notes of my sermon, and occasionally I read every 
sentence from the first to the last. 

The contrast between my theory of preaching and 
my practice is in this respect very glaring ; but I had 
better avail myself of this opportunity of saying that 
in many other respects the contrast, if less glaring, 
is not less real. Some of the worst faults, some of 
the most fatal mistakes, which I have entreated 
you to avoid, are the faults and the mistakes which 
I have found it most difficult to avoid myself; 
and the bitterness with which I may have spoken 
of these vices has come from the soreness of heart 
with which I remember the extent to which they 
have impaired the power of my own preaching, and 
from the resentment I feel against them as my own 



152 M. COQUEREVS DEFINITION. [lect. vi. 

persistent enemies — resentment which has been inten- 
sified by prolonged and not very successful struggles 
to escape from their power. The methods of work 
which I recommend to you are not mere theoretical 
suggestions. I have tested their value ; but some 
of them I began to try too late. I shall be grateful 
if the experience I have acquired from my own 
failures contributes anything to your success. 

It is not every man that appears in the pulpit 
without his manuscript who is an extemporaneous 
preacher. In Scotland and in France, where the 
people regard the " paper " with horror, it is a 
common practice for ministers to write their sermons 
and to learn them by heart — clause after clause, 
sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. 
Some men, without any attempt to learn what they 
have written, reproduce it with hardly the variation 
of a single phrase. I have heard of eminent preachers 
who are able to compose and to retain in their memory 
long discourses without putting pen to paper. None 
of these are extemporaneous preachers. 

On the other hand it is not necessary, in order to 
preach extemporaneously, that we should choose our 
text as we go into the pulpit, and say what happens 
to come first. M. Coquerel puts it admirably when 
he says that the extemporaneous preacher " knows 
what he is going to say, but does not know how he 
will say it."i Even this definition may require some 

^ "Observations Pratiques sur la Pre'dication." Athanase 
Coquerel. Page 193. 



LECT. VI.] MR. VINCE. 153 

qualification. A man may be fairly said to preach 
extemporaneously although he may have in his mind 
a few strong epigrammatic sentences with which he 
intends to close and to clinch some passages in his 
sermon ; and who, in thinking over an illustration 
which requires vivid or delicate treatment, has hit 
upon the felicitous phrases in which he means to 
clothe it. 

A friend of mine now dead, who was a very 
effective preacher and speaker, used to talk over his 
sermons and his speeches, before he delivered them, 
» with any one he happened to meet. He was a very 
busy man, but was always ready for a gossip : his 
gossip was part of his work. How often he has 
caught me in one of the most crowded streets of 
Birmingham, or on the steps of the Public Library, 
and put to me a thought or an argument or an il- 
lustration which he meant to use in a sermon on the 
following Sunday morning, or in a speech in the Town 
Hall the next night ! Perhaps the idea had just 
occurred to him, and then he would develop it 
briefly and in outline, and make it grow while he was 
talking. Perhaps he had already tried it with some 
one he had met earlier in the day, and in that case the 
passage had taken a certain finish : he revised it while- 
he repeated it. It was his custom to write his sermons 
and speeches, though he rarely used any notes ; but it 
is my impression that he had got not only all his 
main thoughts, but the very best words he could 
find for expressing them, before he wrote a line. 



154 BOSSUET. [lect. vi. 

A member of the House of Commons was telling 
me a few weeks ago that one of our famous political 
orators prepares in the same way. Before he makes 
a great speech, said my friend, he talks over all the 
points with every man he sees, and if he can talk to 
nobody else, he will talk to his gardener. Sentence 
after sentence, one epigram after another, gets into 
shape in this way. 

Great mistakes are made about the habits of 
orators and preachers. I remember being struck 
very powerfully when I was a student by a pictu- 
resque description of the way that Bossuet prepared 
his sermons. The writer — I quite forget who it 
was — said that Bossuet used to sit at his table for a 
short time in perfect stillness, while with an eagle eye 
he glanced over the whole extent of the subject on 
which he was meditating ; that gradually he became 
excited, and that then he dashed down ten or a dozen 
sentences, indicating the principal lines along which, 
when he was in the pulpit, his superb genius was to 
travel ; and that when these were written the prepa- 
ration was over. Very picturesque, rather melodra- 
matic, and, if intended as a description of Bossuet's 
uniform practice, absolutely false ! Sometimes, it is 
true, Bossuet wrote very brief notes ; sometimes he 
wrote at length, but wrote rapidly ; sometimes he 
wrote with great care, and subjected what he had written 
to exact revision. His method of preparation varied 
with the varying leisure at his disposal, and with the 
varying subjects on which he preached. And yet he 



LECT. VI.] LACORDAIRE. 155 

may be almost described as an extemporaneous 
preacher, for he does not seem to have been in the 
habit of reproducing with any close accuracy what he 
had written. His preparation had made him master 
of himself and of his subject ; he watched his congre- 
gation ; he worked out lines of thought which, in his 
manuscript, he had barely suggested, if he saw that 
they told ; he sometimes threw aside, when he was 
face to face with the people, what M. Gandar calls 
" the scholastic subtleties, which the theologian, in 
his study, could hardly avoid " ; ^ he took fire as he 
spoke, and he did not try to repress the flame. 

Lacordaire, if we may trust M. Montalembert, who 
was likely to be perfectly informed about his friend's 
habits, was an extemporaneous preacher in the 
strictest sense, and his extemporaneous power, in 
M. Montalembert's judgment, was a principal ele- 
ment of his effectiveness. In preparing his great 
Conferences he took but very little time, but while 
he worked the intellectual effort was intense. He 
wrote nothing. The Conferences were taken down 
in shorthand : the reports were submitted to him 
the next day, and the corrections which he made 
were very inconsiderable. Lacordaire, with all his 
magnificent powers, did not, as M. Montalembert 
acknowledges, escape altogether from the perils which 
beset the extemporary speaker. Sometimes he was 
too emphatic, sometimes too declamatory. It must be 
ascribed, I suppose, to his neglect of writing, that his 
^ '' Bossuet : Orateur." By E. Gandar. Page xlv. 



156 JOHN ANGELL JAMES. [lfxt. vi. 

logic was sometimes weak and sometimes confused ; 
that he often disturbed and even distressed his con- 
gregation by stating with such force an objection which 
he meant to answer, that, when the answer came, it 
appeared inadequate. Perhaps, too, it was because 
he prepared the substance only, and not the form of 
his sermons, that he too rarely achieved the perfect 
beauty which comes from perfect simplicity. ' 

These are the faults into which the extempora- 
neous preacher — no matter what may be his genius — 
is almost certain to be betrayed. He may do very 
much to avoid them if he writes carefully, though 
without any intention of recalling, when he is in the 
pulpit, the precise language in his manuscript. 

The advantages of writing and reading are obvious. 
The preacher who goes to church with his sermon in 
his pocket is sure of having something to say. He 
escapes the anxiety with which many of the best ex- 
temporaneous preachers are tormented every Friday 
and Saturday. My predecessor, John Angell James, 
usually preached without his manuscript, though he 
nearly always wrote his sermons. While I was a 
student he had to preach on what is regarded 
by us as a great occasion in connection with the 
London Missionary Society. He happened to tell me 
three weeks before the sermon was to be delivered 
that he intended to read it, and I ventured, rather 
presumptuously, to remonstrate with him. "Why 

2 See " Le Pere Lacordaire." By Le Comte de Montalembert. 
Second edition, pp. 143-145. 



LECT. vi.J ADVANTAGES OF READING. 157 

shouldn't I read ? " he asked. " Because you are never 
so effective when you read," I replied. He gave me 
an odd look, and said, " Well now, I'll tell you how it 
is. If I preach without reading I shall be miserable for 
three weeks — miserable till I am in the pulpit ; if I 
read, I shall be quite happy till I begin to preach, 
though I shall be miserable till I finish." The old 
man's reason for using his manuscript was not to be 
answered ; and I suppose that there are many 
preachers who, if they did not read, would soon be 
worn away by the anxiety and dread with which they 
would anticipate their Sunday's work. 

It must also be conceded that in sermons in which 
clearness and precise accuracy in the statement of truth 
are of special importance, the man who reads is likely 
to have a great advantage. Language is a difficult in- 
strument to master, and even the ablest speakers and 
those who have had the longest practice cannot always 
command at the moment the simplest and most 
transparent expression of their thought. This is espe- 
cially true when they are dealing with unfamiliar lines 
of speculation. The written sermon is also likely to 
be most successful in the clear and orderly develop- 
ment of an elaborate argument. 

Nor is it fair to say that those who read their ser- 
mons show a distrust of the aid of the Holy Spirit. 
Our self-distrust, our dependence upon Divine teaching 
and aid, may be just as perfect when we are writing as 
when we are speaking. I do not accept the supersti- 
tion which implies that the Spirit of God is with us in 



158 PREACHING OLD SERMONS. [lect. vi. 



the pulpit and not in the study. Those who argue 
that it is a sign of want of faith to write and to read, 
ought also to protest against making any preparation 
for preaching at all. Verbal inspiration is not claimed ; 
it is for the substance of his sermon that the preacher 
is to rely on the illumination of the Spirit of God ; 
and the man who prepares the substance of his ser- 
mon and not the form, is therefore open to precisely 
the same charge as the man who prepares its form as 
well as its substance. So far, indeed, as this argument 
is concerned, I think that the preacher who writes his 
sermons and reads them is in a rather better position 
than the man who prepares the general outlines of his 
thoughts without writing. They both prepare the sub- ■ 
stance of their sermons, for which we are told that " 
they ought to rely on the illumination of the Holy 
Ghost, and therefore they are both equally guilty of 
distrust ; but the one who does not write is also guilty 
of presumption, for he relies on the inspiration of the 
Holy Ghost for the language he will want, though for 
this reliance it is admitted that there is no adequate 
ground. The whole argument is preposterous and 
fanatical. If carried to its logical issue it would re- 
quire us to go into the pulpit without selecting a text. 
There is one advantage on the side of writing and 
reading sermons, which is rarely mentioned. Extem- 
poraneous sermons, as Hooker says, " spend their life 
in their birth, and may have public audience but once."i 
If a man writes and reads he can preach his old ser- 
I Hooker : " Ecclesiastical Polity." Book v. cap. xxi. 



LECT. VI.] PREACHING OLD SERMONS. 159 

mons over again, and preach them effectively. When 
ministers remove to a new congregation, I suppose that 
they have no scruples about preaching sermons which 
they have preached before ; but I can see no sufficient 
reason for not preaching sermons a second or a third 
time to the same congregation. Indeed, after an interval 
of seven or eight years, though we may be preaching in 
the same pulpit, we are not preaching to the same con- 
gregation. Many of the people have died ; some have 
removed to other churches or to other parts of the coun- 
try ; new people have taken their places ; children have 
become young men and women; young men and women 
who were uninterested in the sermon when it was first 
preached have had their moral and intellectual interest 
in religious truth awakened, and will listen to it with 
eager attention. If you write a sermon on any of 
those great topics to which you are bound to recur 
frequently — on the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
for instance, or on the Personality of the Holy Spirit, or 
on the nature of Regeneration, or on the Protestant 
doctrine of Justification, or on the principles which will 
determine the judgment of men at the last day ; — if 
the substance of the sermon is the result of reading 
and thought extending over many months ; if you 
think that the statement of the scriptural proof of the 
doctrine is clear and full and strong ; if the arrange- 
ment satisfies you ; if the whole discussion is as 
complete and effective as you can make it — I think 
that you will waste a good piece of work if you use 
it only once and then throw it aside. Some of the 



i6o CALEB MORRIS. [lect. vi. 

people — perhaps many of them — will recognise it 
as an old sermon ; but your congregation will be a 
very remarkable one if there are more than a very 
few persons who will remember the contents of it 
so perfectly that it will not do them good to hear 
the sermon again. The Rev. Caleb Morris, who, 
thirty years ago, was one of the ablest and most 
fascinating preachers among the English Congrega- 
tionalists, was obliged, some time before his death, 
to resign his pastorate on account of ill-health ; but 
he continued to conduct a religious service in his 
own drawing-room, at which twenty or thirty persons 
were present. I have heard that, after reading the 
Scriptures and offering prayer, he sometimes examined 
his little congregation on the sermon of the preceding 
Sunday. If he found that they did not remember 
it very well he preached it over again. I am not 
sure that I can commend Mr. Morris's practice to 
your imitation, but there was surely a great deal of 
good sense in it. If it became common it would 
considerably lighten our labours in the preparation of 
our sermons. 

Nor is it only sermons which contain an elaborate 
proof and illustration of the great central doctrines of 
the Christian faith which may be preached over again. 
Ten years ago, certain aspects of ethical and religious 
truth and duty exerted exceptional power over my 
own moral and spiritual life : five years earlier, certain 
other aspects of truth had the same ascendency, and 
ruled me with the same authority. These particular 






LECT. VI.] PREACHING OLD SERMONS. i6i 

truths or particular aspects of truth do not seem to 
me less important now than they were when they 
haunted me day and night. Their practical value to 
my congregation does not seem to me less than it 
was then. But they have been so incorporated into 
the very substance of my faith and life, that the 
intense intellectual interest which they once excited 
has gone by. I could not state them now with the 
same energy with which I stated them when they 
absorbed my whole thought and fired me with en- 
thusiastic ardour. And yet when I take up an old 
sermon- in which these aspects of truth or duty are 
illustrated and enforced, the flame bursts out again ; 
I am ten, fifteen years younger ; I can preach the 
sermon with the same vehement moral interest with 
which I preached it first. Sometimes, indeed, I think 
I preach an old sermon of this kind with even stronger 
emotion than I felt when it was fresh, for the ex- 
perience of subsequent years has deepened my sense 
of the value of the truth or the sacredness of the 
duty which it was intended to illustrate. If, however, 
I had to write a new sermon on the same subject, I 
should not be able to write with the same force and 
fire. 

You will be good enough not to misunderstand my 
meaning. I do not suggest that if you write and read, 
you should preach over again the sermons which 
strike you as very " pretty," or very " fine." The ser- 
mons which we have a right to repeat are sermons 
to which we have given so much time and strength 

12 



1 62 PREACHING OLD SERMONS. [lect. vi. 

that they contain the very best that we can say on 
some great subject ; or sermons which, though of per- 
manent interest and value, derived their force from 
the special intellectual and moral experiences which 
we were passing through when they were written. 

When you preach an old sermon, be frank about it. 
There are people who keep a record of our sermons ; 
the margins of their Bibles are enriched with dates 
placed against the texts we have preached from. Do 
not try to cheat these keepers of homiletical chronicles. 
The old sermon may sometimes require a great deal 
of revision : you may have to cancel some passages and 
replace them with others ; you may have to strike out 
many superfluous epithets, to improve the form of an 
illustration, to strengthen the foundations or change 
the structure of an argument ; but do not try to 
conceal the fact that the sermon is not a new one ; let 
the old text stand. 

Do you say that if you preach old sermons and the 
people know it they will think that you are getting 
lazy } If there is any chance of your people thinking 
that you are lazy, you have no right to preach at all. 
A man w^ho is doing his work as he ought to do it, 
will be quite safe from imputations of that sort. 

There is something to be said, then, in favour of 
writing our sermons and reading them ; and there is 
som.ething still more decisive to be said for the prac- 
tice than I have said yet. It is certain that there are 
many able and useful preachers, who, if they did not 
use their manuscript, would be unable to preach at all. 



LECT . VI. ] EXTEMPORANE US PRE A CHING. 1 63 

And yet — notwithstanding my own habits — I am 
compelled to admit that if we can preach without 
reading we are likely to preach more effectively. 

It is not true that read sermons are always dry and 
dull, or that extemporaneous sermons are necessarily 
vivacious and vigorous. Dr. Chalmers was accustomed 
to read every syllable, and yet he preached with a fire 
and a passion which created great excitement and 
produced the deepest impression. How weak, how 
dreary, an extemporaneous preacher may be, we all 
know. But there are few of us that have Dr. Chalmers's 
strong and impetuous nature. Unless there is extra- 
ordinary force in the preacher, the manuscript some- 
how comes between him and the congregation. The 
very reasons which lead us to say that we cannot 
preach unless we read, suggest some of the causes 
which make written sermons ineffective. If a preacher 
reads because he is afraid that he cannot carry in his 
mind all the thought that he is accustomed to put 
into a sermon, the probability is that the thought is 
wanting in simplicity and breadth ; that it is not well 
massed ; that the details are so numerous as to be 
confusing; and that, as a natural and almost inevitable 
consequence, the congregation will master his meaning 
very imperfectly. Or if he is conscious that what he 
wishes to say is not quite familiar to himself, and that 
he must write, in order to make sure of expressing 
it clearly, he may infer that he is not in such complete 
possession of it as to be able to handle it — even in 
writing — with freedom and vigour. If the thought — 

12* 



1 64 EXTEMPORANEOUS PREACHING. [lect. vi. 

though perfectly familiar to the preacher — is so subtle 
and so delicate that a great deal of care is necessary 
to express it accurately, the presumption is that it is 
too subtle and delicate to be caught at a single 
hearing, no matter how felicitous the expression may 
be. The thought of an extemporaneous preacher is 
more likely to be of a kind to interest and impress an 
ordinary congregation than the thought of a preacher 
who reads. 

In the development of his thought the extempora- 
neous preacher has an advantage to which it is hardly 
possible to attach too great importance. When we 
are writing, it is not easy to determine at what point 
we ought to stop in working out an idea. If the idea 
has life in it, and our fancy happens to be fertile, there 
is a great intellectual delight in letting a single thought 
shoot out branch after branch covered with foliage and 
blossom. For an Essay, in which the intellectual in- 
terest is supreme, there is no harm in permitting our 
fancy to have its way ; but in a sermon, in which the 
practical interest dominates everything else, restraint is 
necessary if we are to be effective. As soon as the people 
are conscious that we have been caught by the mere 
intellectual attractions of any thought that has oc- 
curred to us, they become either impatient or critical ; 
they want us to pass on, or else they watch our per- 
formance with curious eyes, to see whether we get 
through it gracefully and brilliantly. The extem- 
poraneous preacher — even though he may have pre- 
pared the substance of a passage that is too elaborately 



I 



LECT. VI.] EXTEMPORANEOUS PREACHING. 165 

ingenious — is checked by the direct relations between 
himself and his audience. He might have read it 
without being conscious that he was at fault ; but, if 
he has any oratorical instinct, it is impossible for him 
to speak it. 

The extemporaneous preacher will also be likely to 
have an advantage in his style. It is true that he 
can hardly be accurate. I met a few years ago some 
very able parliamentary reporters, and they told me 
that there were only three or four men in the House 
of Commons whose speeches it was possible to report 
exactly as they were spoken. But what the extem- 
poraneous speaker loses in accuracy, he may more 
than gain in ease, directness, and vigour. He will 
escape the formality and the " bookishness " of man- 
ner which are the snare of most writers, and which are 
intolerable to all listeners ; and in the generous heat 
which comes from direct contact with his audience, he 
may achieve a boldness both of thought and expres- 
sion which are rarely achieved at the desk. 

There is another advantage which belongs to the 
extemporaneous speaker. In writing, we cannot be 
sure whether we ought to be satisfied with saying a 
thing once, or whether we ought to say it over again. 
In speaking extemporaneously, we watch the faces 
of the people, and we often discover that statements 
which seemed to ourselves perfectly clear, require to 
be repeated, illustrated, and expanded. 

I admit that the question cannot be determined 
peremptorily ; that there are advantages on the side 



1 66 PREPARATION. [lect. vi. 

of preaching from a full manuscript, as well as advan- 
tages on the side of preaching from the briefest notes, 
or from no notes at all. Very much depends on the 
preacher, very much on the character of the congre- 
gation. There are, too, some subjects which may be 
treated as effectively by the man who reads his 
sermons as by the man who preaches extempora- 
neously. But I say again that, on the whole, I am 
clear that the practice of reading our sermons lessens 
the interest and impairs the power of our preaching. 

If you determine — as I trust you will — not to read, 
you will do well to master the materials you have 
prepared for a sermon in the same way in which men 
master the materials they have prepared for a speech. 
On a few sheets of note-paper — if you cannot trust 
your memory — you may indicate your leading lines 
of thought, and the illustrations which you are most 
anxious not to forget. You will find it expedient to 
prepare two or three opening sentences ; it is still 
more expedient to make sure of an effective close. 
One of the best speakers I have ever heard was often 
in the greatest difficulty through his inability to hit 
upon a perfectly satisfactory sentence to finish with. 
Those of us who knew him used to watch him with 
the greatest amusement while he was hunting to the 
right and to the left for what he wanted. We used to 
say that he was " running after his tail." If 3-ou have 
an illustration which requires perfection of form, you 
may write it out carefully and commit it to memory. 
You may also prepare a few keen, epigrammatic, or 



I 



LECT. VI.] PREPARATION. 167 

passionate sentences, in which to concentrate the effect 
of extemporaneous passages which lead up to them. 
I beheve that Plunket, one of the greatest of our 
orators, was accustomed to prepare his speeches in 
this way. It is generally understood that on great 
occasions Mr. Bright follows the same method. 

You need not be afraid that the sentences and 
passages which you have prepared will look like 
Horace's " purple patches " on the meaner fabric 
of your extemporaneous style, or that they will at all 
embarrass the free play of thought and passion. 
There is great shrewdness in the criticism of George 
Sand on the vehement words in which one of her 
heroes — a law student — denounced the practice of law 
— " They came to him too naturally not to have been 
studied."! If you have the true instinct and habit 
of a speaker, these prepared passages will simply 
heighten the effect and complete the impression of 
the rest of your sermon. 

As for the extemporaneous passages, let them be 
perfectly extemporaneous. Make no attempt to re- 
call the words in which your thoughts occurred to you 
in your study. Never permit yourself to criticise the 
form of your sentences ; grasp your thoughts firmly, 
and let the sentences take their chance. The advice 
of Mr. Pitt to Lord Mornington was admirable. "My 
lord," he said, "you are not so successful as you ought 
to be in the House of Commons, and the reason, as I 
conceive, is this : you are more anxious about words 
^ George Sand : " Horace," p. 11. 



1 68 CULTIVATION OF STYLE, [lect. vi. 

than about ideas. You do not consider that if you 
are thinking of words you will have no ideas, but if 
you have ideas words will come of themselves." Lord 
Mornington — who is better known as the Marquis of 
Wellesley — took Pitt's advice, and he became one of 
the most eloquent of English orators. 

But though you ought not to think of your style while 
you are preaching, you must think of it at other times. 
Whether you read your sermons or preach extempo- 
raneously, it is equally necessary that you should take 
a great deal of trouble to acquire a mastery of the 
English language. Do not imagine that a knowledge 
of your own tongue will come to you by instinct or 
inspiration. The power of writing and speaking in 
clear, strong, racy, picturesque, and musical English is 
as truly the result of culture and hard work as the 
power of reading a play of ^schylus or a difficult 
speech in Thucydides. 

I trust that you are already acquiring a discriminat- 
ing admiration for the characteristic qualities of the 
great writers of English prose. The pomp and splen- 
dour and vigour of Edmund Burke, the masculine 
strength of Robert South, the ease of Cowper, the 
perfect transparency and unrivalled felicity of Arch- 
deacon Paley, the subtlety and flexibility of Nathanael 
Hawthorne — you are learning, I hope, to find delight 
in them all. But mere delight is not enough. Voltaire 
used to keep the " Petit Careme" of Massillon always on 
his table. Dr. Johnson, oddly enough, considering his 
own ponderous and artificial manner, said that who- 



LECT. VI.] DO NOT BE IMITATORS. 169 

ever would write English must spend his days and 
nights in the study of Addison. 

You will not, if you are wise, try to imitate the style 
of any of the men whom you admire. " A man who 
writes well," says Montesquieu, " does not write as 
other men write ; he writes in his own way ; " and he 
adds, with a Frenchm.an's delight in an epigram, " he 
often speaks well when he speaks badly." ^ A 
man's style if it is a good one fits his thought like a 
good coat fits his figure. Your friend's coat may fit 
him admirably ; but everything depends upon the fall 
of his shoulders, the length of his arms, and the 
breadth of his chest. If you tried to wear it you might 
find that you had put on a strait-jacket, or that the 
garment which, when worn by your friend, was per- 
fectly graceful, hung about you like a sack. 

Do not imitate the style of the great writers, but 
study them closely enough to learn how infinitely 
varied are the resources of the English tongue. You 
will find it, I think, a useful practice, after reading a 
paragraph which seems to you to be expressed with 
unusual clearness and force, to lay aside the book and 
to endeavour to express the same thoughts yourself 
To compare your own handiwork with the bright 
original will be an instructive exercise : I have found 
it a very humiliating one. As you read, you may 
enlarge your vocabulary by marking and remember- 
ing words — not rare and remarkable words — but very 
ordinary and useful words, which never place them- 
selves at the service of your thought. 

^ Montesquieu : '* Pensees Diverses," p. 226. 



I70 STRUCTURE OF PARAGRAPHS. [lect. vi. 

You will notice idiomatic phrases and forms of 
sentences which you never employ. You will discover 
the various styles of architecture which may be fol- 
lowed in the building up of paragraphs — styles as 
different as Gothic and Grecian, Egyptian and Lom- 
bardic. One man begins by stating the general prin- 
ciple which the paragraph is to illustrate in detail. 
Another puts his concrete illustrations first, and the 
general principle explodes epigrammatically in the 
sentence with which the paragraph closes. Another 
ascends through details to a general principle, and 
then descends to details again. 

The "theme" of a paragraph may, of course, be 
something very different from a general principle. 
The observations I have just made are intended 
simply to show what I mean by the different forms 
which a paragraph may assume. 

Nor is it the great prose writers alone who will 
assist you in writing and speaking good English. 
For the language of pathos and humour, imagination 
and fancy, you will also study the poets — the poets 
who have won their place among English classics. 

Men who have to preach twice every Sunday, and 
most of whose week evenings during eight months 
in the year are spent in lecturing, preaching, speaking, 
or conducting Bible-classes, cannot hope to acquire 
a very noble or beautiful style. But there is no 
reason why our sentences should all be run into one 
mould ; or why we should lose ourselves every few 
minutes in the mazes of an unintelligible parenthesis, 



LECT. VI.] THE STYLE FOR PRAYER. 171 

or why our sermons should be Hke those of a 
preacher it was my happiness to hear occasionally 
when I was your age, each of which invariably con- 
sisted of one unwieldy sentence, sprouting out into 
joint after joint, and never ceasing to grow till for 
some inexplicable but beneficent reason the preacher 
said Amen. There is no reason why, when you have 
at your service the noblest language for an orator that 
was ever spoken by the human race, you should be 
satisfied with the threadbare phrases, the tawdry 
tarnished finery, the patched and ragged garments 
with a smell like that of the stock of a second-hand 
clothes shop, with which half-educated and ambitious 
declaimers are content to cover the nakedness of their 
thoughts. You can do something better than this, 
and you should resolve to do it. 

Perhaps the most difficult of all styles to acquire is 
a style perfectly appropriate to public prayer. The 
mere language of our prayers may seem to some of 
you comparatively unimportant, but I think that not 
only intelligent and cultivated men, but very ordinary 
people, are sensitive to the qualities which render a 
style suitable to the purposes of devotion. They may 
find it impossible to explain why it is that when they 
are listening to one man's prayers their hearts are filled 
with awe and reverence and devout trust, and that 
when they are listening to the prayers of another man, 
who is not less devout, they find it almost impossible 
to pray at all ; but the difference in the mere style of 
the prayers may often suggest a partial explanation of 



172 THE STYLE FOR PRAYER. [lect. vi. 

the difficulty. Phrases which when they were fresh 
were very beautiful, but from which the delicate bloom 
has long ago been quite rubbed off; heterogeneous 
fragments of ill-remembered and ill-applied sentences 
from the Psalms of David, the prophecies of Isaiah, 
and the hymns of Dr. Watts and Charles Wesley — 
these, to a man who is offering prayer, may seem to 
express his own devotional feeling, but they do not 
really express it, and they make it very difficult for 
many who are listening to him to maintain a devo- 
tional temper. The language of conversational fami- 
liarity is worse still. Rhetorical finery is most offensive 
of all. 

These are gross faults easily avoided. No devout 
man of any education need pray in a style which will 
hinder the devotion of others. To acquire the natural 
use of a style which shall assist the devotion of those 
who listen to us, just as the music of a penitential 
hymn breathes a deeper pathos into its confessions of 
weakness and sin, and just as the music of a hymn 
of thanksgiving adds new passion to its gratitude, is 
not so easy. 

That there should be a difference between the 
language of prayer and the language of preaching 
ought to occasion no greater perplexity than the very 
obvious fact that there should be a difference between 
the language of a sermon and the language of a 
hymn. Wordsworth, as you remember, contended 
that the style of a poem becomes unnatural just in the 
degree in which it varies from good prose. The theory 



LECT. VI.] THE STYLE FOR PRAYER. 173 

— happily it was a theory which he rarely practised — 
is at once destroyed by a comparison between any 
page of Wordsworth's prose and any page of Words- 
worth's sonnets. It would be as rational to affirm that 
singing becomes unnatural just in the degree in which 
it varies from ordinary speaking. Every word that 
may be used by a poet may, perhaps, sometimes be 
used by a good prose writer ; nearly every form of 
construction that is admissible in verse is admissible 
in certain kinds of prose ; but there are words, there 
are turns of expression, there are phrases, which are 
perfectly in their place in the columns of a news- 
paper or in the pages of a review, which no poet 
would dream of using in serious verse. It seems to 
me that there are similar limitations — limitations still 
more subtle perhaps — which have to be recognised in 
our prayers, and which should distinguish the style of 
our prayers from the style of our preaching. I can- 
not define the difference between the two styles. The 
critics who rightly controverted Wordsworth's theory 
found it difficult to define the difference between the 
style appropriate to verse and the style appropriate to 
prose. But in both cases the difference exists. 

A friend of mine, whose prayers were perfect in the 
simplicity and beauty of their form, told me that he 
thought no word should be used in prayer that had 
come into the language since the time of Queen 
Elizabeth. The canon seemed to me artificial, and 
most of us would find great difficulty in observing it ; 
but in his own case it was certainly used with ad- 






174 VICES OF STYLE. [lect. vi. 

mirable results. The reasons for using in prayer old 
words which are still living words, will be obvious to 
every one that has thought about the philosophy of 
language. Perhaps, -nstead of adopting my friend's 
rule, it might be well to determine to use in prayer 
those words only which are found in our authorized 
version of the Bible, and to attempt, in the form of 
our sentences, the utmost simplicity of syntactical 
structure. 

Before closing this lecture I should like to say 
something about those vices of style to which young 
writers and speakers are especially liable. But I am 
conscious of the same difficulty which troubled me in 
the early part of the lecture, in which I recommended 
you to preach extemporaneously. The precepts which 
I most honour I have found it hardest to obey. The 
faults which seem to me most serious are those which 
I have always found it difficult to avoid. 

Perhaps I shall be less vividly conscious of my in- 
consistency — and I shall certainly speak to better 
purpose — if I invoke the authority of two or three 
great French writers instead of using my own words. 

Montesquieu reminds us that the easiest style of all 
is the inflated and emphatic style ; but this, he says, is 
the style of a nation just emerging from barbarism. i 
Joubert has several maxims in which he insists on the 
great virtue of simplicity. "Words, like lenses, obscure 
what they do not enable us to see better."^ "The 

^ Montesquieu : " Pensees Diverses," p. 233. 
2 Joubert : " Pensees, Essais, et Maximes," vol. ii. p. 61. 



LECT. VI.] VICES OF STYLE. 175 

oratorical style has often the disadvantage of those 
operas in which the music prevents the words from 
being heard : in this case, the words prevent you from 
seeing the thoughts." i Vauvenargues asserts that if 
a thought cannot be expressed in simple words, it is 
not worth expressing at all. " When a thought is not 
strong enough to bear a simple expression, that is a 
reason for rejecting it." 2 Joubert has also a maxim 
which suggests the necessity of varying our style ac- 
cording to the quality and power of our voice, and 
according to the size as well as the character of our 
congregation.3 A tenor song, even though you 
transpose it a fifth lower, will not suit a bass singer ; 
and the style of speaking which may be very effective 
for a man with a shrill, keen voice, may be absolutely 
grotesque if attempted by a man whose voice is rich 
and deep and full. Some of the lady orators whom I 
have heard do not seem, to have thought of this. 
They speak like men. It is just as if you played on 
the flute a piece of music written for the bass viol. 
The ladies must hit upon a new style of eloquence if 
they intend to be effective public speakers. One or 
two lady orators, whose originality of intellectual 
power and strong individuality save them from being 
imitators, seem to be striking the right path, but they 
have a long way to travel. 

There are two other maxims of Joubert's which are 

I Joubert : " Pensees, Essais, et Maximes," vol. ii. p. 80. 

2 Vauvenargues : " Reflexions et Maximes," p. i. 

3 Joubert. Vol. ii. p. 61. 



176 VICES OF STYLE. [lect. vi. 

worth thinking of every day. " It is by famihar words 
that a style bites and takes possession of the reader. 
It is by these that great thoughts obtain currency 
and are assumed to be good metal, like gold and 
silver stamped with a well - known impression." ^ 
Again : " It is not enough to make people understand 
what you say ; you must make them see it. The 
memory, the understanding, and the imagination 
must all take possession of it."^ In another maxim 
he passes out of the region of literary criticism and 
touches the region of morals. " Let your mind always 
be loftier than your thoughts, and your thoughts loftier 
than your language." 3 If this maxim needs a com- 
mentary, you have it in the well-known verses by John 
Henry Newman, in the " Lyra Apostolica." 

*' Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control. 
That o'er thee swell and throng ; 
They will condense within thy soul, 
And change to purpose strong. 

" But he who lets his feelings run 
In soft, luxurious flow, 
Shrinks when hard service must be done, 
And faints at every woe. 

*' Faith's meanest deed more favour bears. 
Where hearts and wills are weighed, 
Than brightest transports, choicest prayers, 
Which bloom their hour and fade." 3 

" By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy 
words thou shalt be condemned." This warning of our 

I Joubert. Vol. ii. p. 8j. 2 ibid. 3 Ibid. 68. 

3 " Lyra Apostolica," p. Z$. 



LECT. VI.] MORALITY OF STYLE. 177 

Lord's has a special meaning for us ministers. The 
morahty of a merchant consists very largely in the 
way in which he deals with money ; the morality of a 
minister consists very largely in the way in which he 
deals with thoughts and words. There is an integrity 
of the intellect as well as of the exchange. We are 
not honest, merely because our words agree with our 
thoughts ; honesty requires that we should do our 
best to make our thoughts agree with the facts. And 
for truthfulness of speech, it is not enough that we 
never say what we know to be false ; we must do our 
best to form a style that shall be an accurate expres- 
sion of our inner thought and life. 

The morahty of style is a subject so interesting that 
I wonder it has never been discussed. Some one said 
that Gibbon's style was a style in which it was impos- 
sible to speak the truth. There are other vices with 
which a style may be chargeable besides untruthful- 
ness. Young ladies display their vanity in their dress 
and jewels, and perhaps they are sometimes reproved 
by young preachers who display equal vanity in the 
glittering phrases with which they bedizen their ser- 
mons — phrases which they want you to admire as 
much as if they were diamonds, but which are mere 
paste set in base metal. A style with magnificent 
qualities may sometimes touch the line which sepa- 
rates great excellences from great vices. Lord 
Macaulay was conscious that his own style was 
very near being a bad one. It may be doubted 
whether he altogether escaped the perils of which 

13 



178 MORALITY OF STYLE. [lect. vi. 

his strong clear sense warned him. But there can be 
no doubt that in the hands of his imitators his style 
has become as bad as a style can be — ostentatious, 
domineering, and tyrannical. Lord Macaulay's man- 
ner is very contagious. The miserable fate of those 
who have imitated him should teach us to avoid it. 

Some young speakers and writers seem to be 
greatly fascinated with a style which has become 
common in some of our cheaper English newspapers 
during the last few years, and which I have occasion- 
ally met with in sermons published on both sides of 
the Atlantic. I do not know how to describe it except 
by calling it " the hot gin-and-water style " — the gin 
greatly predominating over the water. Sometimes it 
becomes maudlin, sometimes hysterical. It is the 
style of men who are guilty, intellectually, of an 
habitual violation of the laws of temperance and 
sobriety. I suppose that there was an original want 
of firmness in the fibre of their intellectual nature, and 
as the result of their love of intellectual excitement, 
and their impatience of plain honest work, they have 
become permanently diseased. Their intellectual con- 
dition reminds one of what the doctors say about men 
who have drunk so constantly and so heavily, that 
their blood and brain are alcoholised. These unfortu- 
nate writers may never touch a stimulant, but they 
suffer from intellectual delirmm tremens. 

There is hardly a vice, there is hardly a virtue of 
moral conduct, that has not its correlative in style. 
Conceit, vanity and ambition, insolence and pride, 



LECT. VI.] MORALITY OF STYLE. 179 

selfishness, cowardice, slovenliness and indolence, in- 
temperance and violence, pretentiousness and indiffer- 
ence to truth — you may find them all in style as well 
as in character. You may also find the opposite 
virtues — courage, frankness and honesty, humility, 
modesty and simplicity, sobriety, gentleness and in- 
dustry. I do not mean that the vices of a man's style 
are always present in what we call his moral character. 
It sometimes happens that through accidents of tem- 
perament, or through defective early moral discipline, 
or through the imperfect development of conscience, 
ethical laws are grossly violated by the intellect which 
are rigorously respected in conduct. 

Let me remind you, gentlemen, in conclusion, that 
your language is one of the noblest and most precious 
parts of that magnificent inheritance which you have 
received from a great ancestry. It is the living and 
glorious monument of the thought, the endurance, 
the achievements, and the sorrows of many genera- 
tions. It has been created by the affections and 
by the toil of the common people, by the genius of 
orators and poets, by the speculations of philoso- 
phers, by the devotion of saints. It is a legacy from 
your remote forefathers in German forests whose 
virtues are celebrated by the severest of Roman 
historians. It preserves some of the most costly 
treasures of ancient civilisations. It is the fruit 
of long years of patient industry, of cruel wars, of 
voyages in strange seas, and of travels in strange 
lands. It is yours, but all the citizens of this great 

13* 



i8o THE NATIONAL LANGUAGE. [lect. vi. 

commonwealth have a property in it. It is yours, but 
we, too, who live on the other side of the ocean have 
rights in it which you are bound to respect. It is 
yours, but it is entailed on your children and your 
children's children, and you will do them a great 
wrong unless you transmit it to the next generation 
with its wealth unimpoverished and its dignity un- 
impaired. 

You have no more right to injure the national 
language than to chip a statue or to run a penknife 
through a picture, in the national museum. To use 
words so loosely and inaccurately that their definite 
meaning is lost, is to commit an intellectual offence, 
corresponding to that of removing the landmarks of 
an ancient estate. To prostrate noble words to base 
uses is as great a wrong to the community as to deface 
a noble public monument. A word once degraded 
can rarely be restored to its original rank ; the bloom 
once rubbed off by rude and unmannerly hands can 
rarely be recovered ; when once defiled by gross and 
vulgar associations, its delicate purity is lost for ever. 

Your language is not yours — not yours alone ; it 
belongs to your country and to posterity. Take care 
that, so far as you are concerned, none of its fertile 
provinces are permitted to sink out of cultivation ; 
take care that the cold grey sea is not permitted to 
encroach on the coast. Maintain its ancient idiom. 
Honour the laws which have governed its structure. 
While a language lives it must grow. Old words must 
gradually fall off from it, like dead leaves from a tree 



LECT. VI.] THE NATIONAL LANGUAGE. i8i 

in autumn ; new words must express the new life^ like 
the fresh leaves on a tree in spring. But if you are 
not the last to use the old words, do not be the first to 
use the new. A language lives on the lips of the 
people, not in the dictionary. A dictionary is not 
merely a home for living words ; it is a hospital for 
the sick ; it is a cemetery for the dead. We, who 
have the ear of the people, can help to keep the best 
part of the language alive. Let us resolve that we 
will do nothing to make Shakespeare and Spenser, 
and Milton and Dryden, and Hooker and Howe, and 
Barrow and Baxter, and Defoe and Addison, and 
Bolingbroke and Swift and Burke, less intelligible to 
posterity than they are to ourselves. 

It is said of a distinguished German philosopher 
that he pursued his philosophical studies undisturbed 
and apparently uninterested by the supreme struggle 
of his country with Napoleon ; that " his patriotism 
was limited to the German language, whose powerful 
beauties he appreciated so keenly that it maddened 
him to see it wielded in the clumsy grasp of ordinary 
writers." i I cannot recommend you to cherish so 
exclusive a devotion to the language of your country 
that you shall become indifferent to the violation of 
its territory ; but among the duties which an educated 
American citizen owes to the Republic, this seems to 
me to have no inconsiderable place — the duty of 
maintaining the purity and the strength and the 
honour of the national tongue. 

' Schopenhauer. See his Life, p. 47. 



LECTURE VII. 

EVANGELISTIC PREACHING. 

GENTLEMEN,— In a volume of Essays on the 
Christian Ministry/ which I remember reading 
when I was a student — Essays, by the way, selected ■ 
from your ov^xi Biblical Repository and other American 
periodicals — there was an anonymous paper, in which 
it was argued that a preacher ought to have a large 
and deep acquaintance with the life of the age in which 
he lives. " A Knowledge of his own Times important 
to a Christian Minister'' — this was the title of the 
paper, and this was the proposition which the writer 
maintained with great earnestness, ingenuity, and elo- 
quence. I wish he had written a second paper with a 
slightly different title — " A Knowledge of other Times 
than his own important to a Christiaii Minister!' For, 
not to mention many other topics which might have 
found a place in the second essay, the writer might 
have shown that the despondency — I might almost 
say the terror and despair — with which some good 
men speak of the forces which are hostile to the 
Christian Faith in our own days, would give place to 

* " Essays on the Christian Ministry." Edited by W. H. 
Murch, D.D. London. Third edition. 1848. 



LECT. VII.] NO REASON FOR DESPONDENCY. 183 

hopefulness and courage if they knew more of the 
irrehgion and unbeHef of past centuries. 

There is no reason, gentlemen, why in these times a 
Christian preacher need be out of heart, whether he 
preaches in America or in England. 

Do you remind me of the passionate eagerness for 
wealth, which is one of the chief vices both of your 
country and of mine .'' — of the fierceness of com- 
mercial competition, which forces upon merchants, 
manufacturers, and tradesmen, who would be satisfied 
with a modest income, incessant vigilance and inces- 
sant labour in order to escape commercial ruin } Or 
are you dismayed by what you hear or what you see 
of the feverish restlessness which makes men incapable 
of living a quiet life, and which makes them crave 
incessantly for exciting and sensational pleasures } 

But the men and women about you are, after all, 
God's children, and as He has not forgotten them, 
they are unable to forget Him. Like their fathers, 
they, too, are sometimes conscious of vague and mys- 
terious yearnings for an unknown and infinite good. 
They, too, sometimes come into the shadow of vast 
and solemn thoughts about the life beyond the 
grave. To them, too, conscience reveals the august 
authority of the Eternal Law of Righteousness. They 
spend lonely hours in sick chambers. They watch 
by the bed of the dying. They mourn for their 
dead. The deeper sorrows, the deeper joys of human 
life, do not vary much from age to age. The fairest 
hopes still fall away like spring-blossoms, and the 



i84 INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY. [lect. vii. 

sweetest pleasures pass away like summer flowers ; 
the strongest self-confidence is humiliated, the most 
vigorous ambition is thwarted. The old story is trans- m 
lated into new languages, but the plot remains the 
same. 

In brain and muscle, in heart and lungs, in form 
and limb, men are very much the same to-day that 
they were centuries ago — in the times of great reli- 
gious revivals, in the times of the apostles and of the 
Lord Jesus Christ Himself The eyes of men are still 
open to the brightness of the heavens, and their ears 
to the sound of the wind. And so the avenues by 
which in past generations God found His way into the 
innermost depths of their moral and spiritual life are 
still unclosed. Men may still be penetrated with awe 
by the Divine righteousness, may still be touched by 
the Divine pity, may still be compelled to tremble by 
the fear of the Divine anger: they may still be made 
to long for the sound of God's voice, for the grasp of 
His hand, and for the vision of His glory. 

As for the intellectual activity of our times, of which 
some good men are so afraid, I cannot see that there 
is anything in it to create alarm. There are grave 
perils, no doubt, in the moral tendency of certain 
philosophical theories, which shelter themselves under 
the authority of recent scientific speculations ; but 
ever since St. Paul wrote to the Colossian Christians 
about that false Gnosis which was attracting them 
from the simplicity of the gospel, the Church has had 
to maintain a perpetual struggle against theories of 



LECT. VII.] INTELLECTUAL ACTLVLTY. ' 185 

human nature and of the universe, which threatened 
the very foundations of faith. It is one thing, however, 
to say that the ancient conflict between the truth of 
Christ and human unbehef is not yet over ; it is an- 
other thing to be alarmed on account of the intel- 
lectual activity of our times. Intellectual activity is 
unhappily far less common than one would suppose, 
from the accounts which are sometimes given of it. 

I do not find that the majority of the English 
people spend their days and nights in studying phy- 
sical science, or that there is a universal and consuming 
passion for the writings of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Nor 
do I find that there is such an enthusiastic devotion 
to literature and art, that it is impossible to induce 
people to think of anything else. It is not true, so far 
as I know, that balls and garden-parties have had to 
be given up, because all the young ladies between six- 
teen and five and twenty are absorbed in the music of 
Herr Wagner or in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. It 
is not true, so far as I know, that cotton-manufacturers, 
iron-masters, merchants, farmers, have given up their 
newspapers, that they may have more leisure for making 
out the meaning of Mr. Robert Browning's later poems. 
Nor did I hear that the London Stock Exchange was 
closed last season while the Grosvenor Gallery was 
open, because the brokers were anxious to give all 
their time to the study of the remarkable paintings 
of Mr. Burne-Jones, and the Nocturnes in Blue and 
Silver, and the Harmonies in Amber and Black, of 
Mr. James Whistler. I can only speak for the people 



i86 INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY. [lect. vii. 

of London and Liverpool and Manchester and Bir- 
mingham, and for those I happen to know in some of 
the quieter towns and villages of the old country. In 
Boston and New York, in Chicago and Charlestown, 
among your western settlers and the farmers of New 
England, it may of course be altogether different. 

Even among the men who are eminent for their 
scientific or literary attainments, it does not seem to 
me that, except in rare instances, science or literature 
so completely fills up the whole capacity of their 
thought, and obtains so complete a mastery of their 
passions, that they are incapable of being interested in 
ordinary affairs. I know literary men and scientific 
men who care for national politics and for municipal 
business. They even think about how they can get 
5 per cent, for their investments instead of 4}^ ; they 
go out to dinner like other people, and they can talk 
about the weather ; they fall in love ; they marry ; 
they have a taste for old china and for furniture of the 
time of Queen Anne. Their knowledge brings them 
some noble excitements and satisfactions ; but human 
nature in thevi is after all very much what it is in the 
rest of the race. They, too, are the children of God, 
and they have wants and capacities which neither 
science nor literature can ever satisfy. 

The Christian Faith has lived through epochs of 
intellectual excitement at least as intense as that by 
which the more active intellectual life of our own day 
is exalted. Have you forgotten the enthusiasm and 
pride of the intellectual revival which came to Europe 



LECT. VII.] THE RENAISSANCE, 187 

in the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries ? All the 
intellectual glory of ancient Greece suddenly flooded 
the mind of Italy, France, and Germany. The noblest 
eloquence, philosophy, poetry, and art which the world 
had ever known, and which had been almost forgotten 
for centuries, were restored to the scholars of Europe, 
and produced an intellectual intoxication which per- 
haps has hardly ever been equalled since. Men felt that 
never before had they seen the transcendent splendours 
of human genius — that never before had they even 
suspected the vast possibilities of the intellectual 
powers of man ; — but that time of intellectual triumph 
was followed, not by the destruction of Faith, but by 
the greatest of all religious revivals in the history of 
the Christian Church, the Protestant Reformation. 

The new learning of the Renaissance might natu- 
rally have been regarded with terror. Paganism was 
invested with an intellectual glory which for a time 
made the brightest triumphs of the intellect of Chris- 
tendom look poor and dim. The new learning which 
came with these dazzling pretensions, dealt with many 
of the problems for which a solution had been sought 
in theology ; and it appealed to those very elements 
of our nature which are stirred by religious faith. It 
was no wonder that for a time men listened to Plato 
and forgot St. Paul ; that their imagination was filled 
by the solemn grandeur and the perfect beauty of the 
ancient tragedians, so that the eloquence of Isaiah and 
the pathos of the Psalms were for a time overborne. 
The Science of our times is a less formidable rival 



1 88 REVELATION AND SCIENCE. [lect. vii. 

to Faith, It does not touch the great problems in 
which the heart of man is most deeply interested ; or, 
if it ventures to touch them, it ceases to be Science 
and becomes pure speculation. 

It is of no avail to tell us about the structure of 
the lachrymal gland when we want to know how 
the sorrow which finds a momentary relief in tears is 
to receive a permanent consolation. In quiet times 
we can listen with keen and respectful interest to all 
that Science can tell us about our mysterious kinship 
to the inferior animals, and even to the lowest forms 
of vegetable life ; but there are times in which we are 
conscious of a kinship of another kind — kinship to a 
life that is above us as well as to a life that is below 
us — and the higher kinship provokes an intenser in- 
terest, and is felt to be our supreme concern. The 
laws of heat and light, the history of the physical 
universe, the structure of our own physical nature, pro- 
voke intellectual curiosity ; but the deeper passions 
of our hearts are not touched until we are spoken to 
about the origin, and obligation, and transcendent 
nobleness and beauty of that idea of goodness which 
haunts us and v/hich we cannot reach ; about the 
struggles and triumphs of heroic virtue and the per- 
fection of saints ; about the consciousness of fault and 
failure which clings to us and which we cannot throw 
off; about the possibility of a future existence, in 
which our baffled hopes of resolving into a perfect 
harmony the harsh discords of our moral life may be 
fulfilled ; about the authority of God, about access to 



LECT. Yii.] REVELATIOX AXD SCIENCE. 189 

the Divine presence in this Avorld, and about a day of 
judgment in the world to come. 

Of all these things Science knows nothing. As 
soon as we enter into the sphere of moral freedom we 
ascend to heights which are beyond the vring and 
beyond even the vision of scientific speculation ; for 
Science knows of no laws which are not uniformly 
obeyed, and in JMorals we have to do with laAvs which 
we are free to obev or to transcrress. 

There is no reason, gentlemen, for being afraid that 
the splendid scientific triumphs of our time, triumphs 
in which every devout heart ought to rejoice, will 
stand in the way of our work. The whole region of 
human nature to which we appeal, Science leaves quite 
untouched. 

Ever}^ age, however, has its superstitions, and one 
of the curious susperstitions of our own days may, 
perhaps, impair the energy of your own faith, and so 
diminish the force of }'our preaching. It seems to be 
taken for granted that because a man is very great on 
the life and structure of flowers' and animals, he has 
exceptional authority on questions about God and 
immortalit}-; and that because he knoAvs a great deal 
about light and heat and electricity, he is sure to have 
very much to tell us about the spiritual universe. Yet 
no one supposes that because a man is a learned 
lawyer he is likeh' to give us safe advice about how to 
treat scarlet fever ; and no one thinks that because a 
man is a very skilful physician, he has any claim to 
speak with authority on the best form of construction 



IQO REVELATION AND SCIENCE. [lect. vii. 

for steam-boilers or on the merits of a new plough. 
Even among scientific men themselves you will hear 

it said, Mr. is a great astronomer, but he knows 

nothing of biology ; or he is a profound chemist, but 
he knows nothing of physiology. It is plain that a 
man may be eminent in one branch of physical 
science, and that in another branch his opinion may 
not be worth listening to : it is still more obvious that 
when a scientific man discusses ethical questions and 
questions of spiritual philosophy, he is dealing with 
subjects which are so remote from his usual studies, 
that his scientific knowledge and discipline give his 
opinions no claim to exceptional deference. To attach 
weight to a man's views on the authenticity of the 
four Gospels, or on any questions of religious truth 
and duty, because he is a distinguished geologist, 
chemist, or biologist, is just as preposterous as to 
attach weight to a man's views on geology because he 
is a profound theologian. The story of the conflict 
between Science and Religion is full of interest and of 
instruction, but it is only half finished. A century or 
two hence, when a few additional chapters will have 
to be written, some of our brilliant and eloquent con- 
temporaries, who on scientific grounds — and with all 
the authority derived from their scientific achieve- 
ments, are requiring us to abandon our faith in moral 
freedom and our hope of a life beyond the grave, will 
take their turn in the pillory — will be the objects of 
the same scorn and derision as the theologians who in 
the name of the Church, and on the authority of the 



I 



LECT. VII.] REVELATION AND SCIENCE. 191 

Book of Genesis and the Book of Psalms, imprisoned 
Galileo, condemned Kepler's laws as religious heresies, 
and made it a treason against God to believe that the 
earth revolves on its axis, and was created more than 
six thousand years ago. 

You, I hope, will make it a matter of conscience to 
avoid the error committed by theologians in past ages, 
and committed in another form by some scientific 
men in our own times. As religious teachers, you 
have absolutely no authority over questions lying 
within the province of Science. At no point in the 
working out of any scientific problem have you — as 
religious teachers — any right to interfere. You have 
no right to ask for any consideration of the interests 
of religious faith in the settlement of any scientific 
controversy. The judges in your law courts would 
resent as an insult to their integrity any suggestion 
that they should put the slightest pressure upon the 
law in order to favour the interests of their personal 
friends or of their political party. You offer an equal 
insult to the integrity of scientific men when you betray 
any wish that in their scientific inquiries they should 
be influenced by the way in which it is supposed that 
their conclusions might affect the authority of Divine 
revelation. It is part of their religious duty to settle 
scientific questions on scientific grounds, and on 
scientific grounds only. For you to wish them to 
work under a bias, is the indication of a flaw in your 
intellectual honesty, and a decisive proof of a want of 
courage and firmness in your religious faith. 



192 APOLOGETIC PREACHING. [lect. vii. 

To what extent it is our duty to discuss in the 
pulpit modern speculations — partly scientific, partly 
philosophical — which are hostile to the Christian 
Faith, is a question which every man must determine 
for himself. You must determine it by considering 
your own resources and the character of your con- 
gregation. 

If you touch controversies of this kind, you ought 
to be quite certain that you understand the theories 
which you are attacking, and that you have mastered 
the grounds on which they rest. You ought, also, 
to be quite sure that you can reply — not to the 
weakest — but to the strongest arguments by which they 
are supported. The serious beliefs of men ought to be 
discussed seriously and fairly. It is perfectly legiti- 
mate to illustrate the grotesque absurdity of a false 
speculation when we can prove it to be false ; it is 
perfectly legitimate to kindle a generous indignation 
against an intellectual imposture if we have the know- 
ledge and skill to unmask it ; but to attempt to laugh 
our opponents out of court without meeting their case, 
and to make passion take the place of reason, are 
shameful offences against the laws of intellectual 
honour and equity. I trust that the ethics of theolo- 
gical controversy are better understood by us than they 
were by our fathers ; but theological controversialists, 
like controversialists of other kinds, are always under 
a strong temptation to seek fair ends by foul means. 
We have no right to secure the condemnation of the 
basest criminals by menacing the jury and bribing 



LECT. VII.] APOLOGETIC PREACHING, 193 

the judge. I do not believe in Lynch law, ev^en for 
the worst crimes. It is dangerous to try to cast out 
devils in the name of Beelzebub the prince of the 
devils. We shall never fight the battles of Heaven to 
any purpose with arms forged in hell. To attempt to 
destroy even the most pernicious error by reckless 
misrepresentation, by appeals to ignorance and blind 
passion, by weapons poisoned with slander, is to repeat 
the crime of the Jesuits, who are credited with sanction- 
ing the assassination of heretical princes. If you touch 
controversy, be just, be generous, to your opponents. 

But it is doubtful whether it is wise for most of us, 
especially in the earlier years of our ministry, to carry 
on any direct controversy with scientific and philo- 
sophical unbelief Sermons on subjects of this kind 
should, in any case, be preached very seldom. In 
ordinary congregations there are very few persons 
who have any exact knowledge of the speculations 
by which the Christian Faith is menaced, very few 
who are acquainted with the scientific grounds on 
which most of these speculations rest, very few who 
are trained to those intellectual habits which are 
necessary for forming any intelligent judgment on 
them. Our true business — and this we should be care- 
ful not to neglect — is to secure our own territory. So 
far as Science is concerned, the war we have to carry 
on is purely defensive. In our case, the principle of 
non-interference is not only legitimiate but obligatory. 
As theologians, we have no occasion to be troubled so 

14 



194 HOW TO MEET MODERN DOUBT. [lect. vii. 

long as our neighbours do not pass our frontier. We 
may leave it to scientific men to discuss the claims of 
Darwinianism on scientific allegiance ; to us as theo- 
logians the settlement of the scientific controversy has 
no practical interest. Our only interest is to know 
the truth. It is, perhaps, impossible for us to main- 
tain an absolute neutrality of feeling while watching 
the civil strife which disturbs a neighbouring kingdom, 
and there are many reasons which might lead us to 
prefer that the struggle should be settled in favour of 
Mr. Darwin's theory rather than against it ; but we 
must respect the rights of belligerents while the 
struggle lasts, and we are prepared to accept whatever 
theory may ultimately make good its authority. 

We are not prepared, however, to yield to either 
party an inch of the soil which belongs to ourselves, 
and which it is our duty to defend. A defensive con- 
troversy is imposed upon us as a necessity. In the 
name of Science, in the name of Philosophy, theories 
are propagated which underm.ine moral responsibility 
and train the soul, first to ignore and then to deny the 
existence and the authority of the living God. These 
theories are in the air. They determine the method 
of many social speculations which to innocent minds 
seem to have no relation to religious truth. They are 
the fundamental assumptions which underlie a great 
deal of historical criticism. They give a colour to 
leading articles on the political questions of the hour. 
You find them everywhere. 

I believe that the wisest and most effective way of 



LECT. VII.] HOW TO MEET MODERN DOUBT. 195 

dealing with these theories is to insist very earnestly 
on the moral and religious truths which are imperilled. 
The scientific speculations — true or false — are no 
special concern of ours. The moral and religious 
truths which are menaced have their own evidence. 
The issue of the controversy largely depends, for the 
moment, upon the vigour and authority of conscience, 
and upon the ardour and vehemence of those moral 
affections which are the allies of conscience and the 
strong defenders of her throne. Let there be a regular 
and systematic endeavour to strengthen among the 
members of your congregations the sense of moral 
responsibility. Give no quarter to the miserable and 
ignominious doctrine that the moral character of a 
man is determined by his environment. Heap up fires 
of indignation on the excuses that men find for their 
crimes in their circumstances. While frankly acknow- 
ledging that physical temperament, early education, 
the nature of a man's employment, his social position, 
his success or failure in business, the food he eats, the 
very temperature of the air he breathes, may affect his 
moral life injuriously or favourably, teach men that it 
is the prerogative of human nature to force and com- 
pel the most adverse circumstances to give new. firm- 
ness to integrity and new fire to enthusiasm, to harden 
the fibre of courage, to make generosity more genial 
and pity more compassionate, to exalt innocence to 
virtue and virtue to heroism. The literature of all 
ages and all countries is on your side — history, poetry, 
and eloquence ; the common speech of all nations is 

14* 



196 HOW TO MEET MODERN DOUBT. [lfxt. vii. 

on your side — language, which is the expression of the 
enduring instincts of human nature, refuses to confound 
crime and misfortune, affirms a distinction of infinite 
and eternal significance between the conditions of 
human life for which men are to be pitied or envied, 
and the moral acts for which they are to be honoured 
or condemned ; the conscience of every man to whom 
you speak is on your side, and though drugged by 
immoral sophistries, or almost driven from her throne 
by the revolt of evil passions, let her hear your voice 
asserting her regal titles, and calling back her subject 
powers to their allegiance, and she will spring up in 
terrible and glorious majesty — an archangel of God, 
armed with the lightnings and thunders of Heaven. 
Robust ethical preaching is one of the surest defences 
against the worst and most prevalent forms of modern 
unbelief. 

A vigorous conscience is not only a protection 
against those materialistic theories of the universe 
which deny the reality of Moral Freedom, it is also 
the surest and m.ost trustworthy ally of faith in the 
Living God. It is the moral side of human nature 
that touches the Divine. It is through the conscious- 
ness that we ourselves have a will v>^hich moves freely 
among natural laws, and is not bound by them, that 
we are able to believe in a God who is above Nature. 
Let the consciousness of Moral Freedom be lost or 
become feeble, and by no metaphysical searching will 
men be able to find out a personal God. 

But if men are to be held fast to their religious 



LECT. VII.] HOW TO MEET MODERN DOUBT. i^-j 

faith by the instincts of their moral Hfe, the God we 
preach must not be a kindly good-natured God, who 
does not think very seriously of our moral character, 
who cares more for our comfort than for our righteous- 
ness, who commands no obedience, but leaves us to 
order our lives as we please, " according to our light," 
who threatens sin with no penalties, and will make us 
all happy at last. This sentimental conception of God 
corresponds to no reality. The relations between God 
and ourselves are wholl}^ misconceived when we forget 
that He has a right to rule, and that we are under 
an obligation to obey. The conception is powerless 
as well as false. It never secures any firm hold of the 
deeper life of men. They part with it and are con- 
scious of no loss ; none of the great forces which stir 
human passion and inspire human energy are missed. 
We must assert God's authority; and if we assert it 
there are irrepressible instincts in the moral and spi- 
ritual life which will confess the duty of submission. 

But should we not try to meet men on their own 
ground 1 It is just as true that God loves men as that 
He claims authority over them ; — is it not our wisdom 
to present those aspects of truth which attract sym- 
pathy and provoke no antagonism 1 If we adopt any 
other line, shall we not destroy what little faith some 
men still retain ? Every one will listen to us when we 
speak of the Divine love, but to the idea of God's 
moral authority, and especially to the idea that this 
authority will be resolutely maintained, the temper and 
spirit of our age are irreconcilable. 



198 NO CONCESSIONS TO UNBELIEF. [lect. vii. 

" Meet men on their own ground ? " Yes. But the 
only legitimate reason for meeting them on their own 
ground is the intention to persuade them to come over 
to ours. We may " meet them on their own ground," 
but if we remain on the ground which is occupied by 
those who are in revolt against Christ, we go over to 
the camp of the enemy. Some preachers seem to 
suppose that the true method of converting unbelievers 
is to explain away or to conceal everything in the 
Christian faith to which unbelievers object, and to 
emphasise everything in it which they are willing to 
admit. While listening to preachers of this kind, 
men cannot help thinking that if there is so very 
little difference between what is contained in the gospel 
and what they have discovered for themselves, and so 
very little difference between what they are already 
and what they would have to become if they acknow- 
ledged the Christian law of life, their conversion to 
Christ must be a matter of very slight importance. 

I believe that the principle which should govern 
the Christian preacher is precisely the reverse of that 
which is accepted by these pleasant and accommo- 
dating apologists. Addressing men who have an hon- 
ourable abhorrence of untruthfulness and injustice, 
but who ignore the personal claims of Christ on their 
obedience and their trust, I should never hope to con- 
vert them by insisting that according to the teaching 
of Christ no reverence for Himself is of any worth 
apart from moral integrity ; nor should I have any 
hope of converting charitable persons who are insen- 



LECT. VJi.] NO CONCESSIONS TO UNBELIEF. 199 

sible to the claims of the Divine authority by expa- 
tiating on those parts of our Lord's teaching which 
urge the claims of human poverty and suffering. In 
England, and I suppose in America, there are large 
numbers of people who acknowledge the ethical 
beauty of our Lord's teaching and the ideal perfection 
of His character, but who cannot tolerate the awful 
menaces which He uttered against the impenitent, and 
who refuse to acknowledge that faith in Christ can be 
the condition of everlasting life, and that unbelief will 
end in everlasting destruction. Such persons will listen 
to us with perfect complacency while we discourse on 
the duty of gentleness, kindness, and self-sacrifice, 
and while we illustrate the infinite mercy and com- 
passion of our Father in heaven. Preaching of this 
sort will not provoke their resentment ; it will com- 
mand their sympathy and admiration. But though 
everything that we say on these subjects may be true, 
we shall never, by preaching exclusively on subjects 
of this kind, overcome their deeply-rooted hostility to 
the authority of . Christ. To preach to such persons 
in this way, and in this way only, is what I mean by 
meeting them on their own ground and remaining 
there. 

But was not this St. Paul's policy at Athens } Did 
he not appeal to the inscription on a heathen altar, and 
found an argument on a quotation from a heathen 
poet } No doubt. But when he appealed to the 
inscription on one of their own altars, it was not with 
the intention of assuring them that they had already 



200 DID ST. PAUL TEMPORISE i [lect. vii. 

discovered nearly everything that he could tell them 
about the " God that made the world and all things 
therein : " the inscription is used with consummate 
grace to imply that though God created us, and is 
" not far from every one of us," and though " in him 
we live and move and have our being," to the Athenians 
He was " an unknown God." The line from an ancient 
poet is not quoted to show that the Greeks had already 
anticipated a large part of the revelation which it was 
St. Paul's commission to make known to mankind : it 
was quoted with the express object of attacking the 
whole system of idolatry : " Forasmuch, then, as we 
are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that 
the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven 
by art and man's device." This was St. Paul's method 
of meeting unbelievers on their own ground. He found 
his way into their fortifications to turn their own guns 
upon them. He exploded their whole system from 
within. He quoted the inscription on one of their 
own altars in order to suggest that neither their philo- 
sophy nor the traditions of their ancestors had given 
them any knowledge of the true God. He quoted 
Aratus or Kleanthes in order to expose the ignorance 
of the Divine greatness which was illustrated by the 
temples and statues which they had erected in honour 
of their divinities. 

Nor — though this was the first discourse that he 
delivered to them — did he keep within the limits of 
philosophical discussion about the nature of God, 
and the true method of worshipping Him. He went 



LECT. VII.] DID ST. PAUL TEMPORISE? 201 

on at once to speak about judgment to come, and 
about Christ's resurrection from the dead. He might, 
had he chosen, have said many things to which the 
Epicureans and Stoics would have listened with 
interest, and even with respect. He might have 
discussed questions of morals. He might have com- 
pared or contrasted the ethical teaching of Christ 
with their own. But all this would have been to no 
purpose. The resurrection of Christ might provoke 
their mockery, but to be silent about it would have 
given them a false conception of the gospel. It was 
more important that the Athenians should know the 
truth — whether they received it or not — than that St. 
Paul should conciliate their respect. 

The principle on wWch I am insisting is a very 
simple one : whether true or false, it is intelligible. 
We shall never make men Christians by suppress- 
ing and throwing into the shade those parts of the 
Christian revelation which especially provoke their 
hostility. Truth which men regard as incredible, 
truth which men resent — we must be sure, first of all, 
that it is truth, and truth of an important kind — is 
precisely the truth which men most need to hear, and 
which is likely to produce the deepest moral impres- 
sion. In this age, therefore, when, according to the 
theory of some thinkers who are exerting a powerful 
influence over popular thought on both sides of the 
Atlantic, ethics and religion are little if anything 
more than a branch of physiology ; when the worst 
passions of bad men and the devotion of saints are 



202 WHAT TO PREACH IN THESE DAYS. [lect. vii. 

regarded as mere functions of our physical organi- 
sation ; when vice and virtue are supposed to be 
^' products like sugar and vitriol, the laws of whose 
production Science may be expected to discover ; " 
when the will is treated as only one form of that uni- 
versal force which, in whatever form it is revealed, is 
subject to fixed and invariable laws ; when we are 
asked in the name of Science, and in the name of 
an unselfish devotion to humanity, to renounce the 
hope and even the desire of personal immortality, 
and to be satisfied if, by the labour and virtue of this 
transient life, we contribute something to the moral 
and intellectual development of the race ; when we 
are asked to reduce our faith in God Himself to a 
belief in the omnipresence of something which passes 
comprehension, or at best are permitted to acknow- 
ledge Him as a power without us, that works for 
righteousness, a power that cannot be touched to pity 
by our sorrows, cannot be indignant when we sin, 
cannot watch with ardent sympathy our struggles 
with temptation, cannot rejoice with us in our 
triumphs and be troubled with us in our defeats ; — 
in these days it is the duty of the Christian preacher 
to assert with greater energy than ever the moral 
freedom of man, the certainty of a life beyond the 
grave, and the personality and authority of the 
Living God. 

Sermons on these elementary topics are not to be 
regarded as merely controversial, philosophical, or 
ethical. Their intention is to strengthen those 



LECT. VII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. 203 

natural instincts, and those elements of what may 
be called the natural faith of men, which are 
threatened by prevalent forms of unbelief, and to 
which the supernatural revelation which has come 
to us through Christ appeals. They should be pene- 
trated w^ith an evangelistic spirit, and their immediate 
or ultimate object should be to make men conscious 
of sin, and to prevail upon them to serve God. 

Our evangelistic preaching might, perhaps, be more 
successful if we gave more careful and intelligent 
thought to the conditions of success. To tell men 
over and over again that they ought to repent and 
believe the gospel, to entreat them, no matter with 
what vehemence, to " accept Christ," will rarely 
produce any real results. Nor shall we do much 
by telling men that they ought to be afraid of God's 
anger, and that they ought to trust in His love. 
We have to present to their mJnds and hearts those 
truths which will make them wonder at the infinite 
greatness of the love of God, and which will make 
them afraid to provoke His wrath ; those truths which ' 
will create repentance and inspire faith. I know that 
to preach the gospel so as to reach the hearts and 
consciences of men, we need a special gift of the Holy 
Ghost : this gift we ought to seek in earnest prayer. 
I know, too, that the preaching of even an apostle 
will be powerless apart from the direct action of the 
Spirit of God upon the souls of men ; and the 
manifestation of the presence and power of the Spirit 
is not to be expected unless we pray for it. It remains 



204 THE PHILOSOPHY OP CONVERSION. [lect. vii. 

true that the substance and manner of our preaching 
should be determined by the effect which we wish to 
produce. 

I doubt whether we sufficiently consider the variety 
of motives which bring men to Christ, or the kind of 
preaching which is likely to call these motives into 
vigorous and effective action. There is room for a 
treatise on the Philosophy of Conversion, in which 
questions of this order might be investigated. In the 
absence of any such treatise, which if it w^ere written 
by a competent hand would be invaluable, we must 
do the best we can for ourselves. Your remembrance 
of your own religious history and your knowledge of 
the religious history of your friends will furnish many 
suggestions that may be of use to you. These mate- 
rials will be rapidly increased if you watch the reli- 
gious life of the members of your congregations. 

Some men begin to live a Christian life under a sense 
of duty. There is no keen sorrow for sin ; there is no 
serious dread of the Divine anger ; there is no fear of 
eternal perdition. Very much that usually precedes 
conversion follows it, and follows it sometimes after a 
long interval. Christ appeals to the conscience, and 
He is obeyed. There may be persons to whom we are 
preaching who wdll respond to this appeal, and to this 
appeal only. We should therefore ask how we can pre- 
sent the Christian life so as to compel the consciences 
of these men to confess that this is the kind of life 
they ought to live. We should consider how we can 
preach upon the moral greatness and authority of 



LECT. VII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. 205 

Christ so as to make them feel that disloyalty to Him 
is a grave moral offence, and that to acknowledge Him 
as the Lord and Ruler of their lives is their supreme 
duty. 

Other men are drawn to God by the hope of escap- 
ing from a vague dissatisfaction with themselves and 
with the poverty of their life. Young people soon 
find that life is not so large and rich and animating as 
they hoped it w^ould be. In the absence of ambition, 
or of an exceptional enthusiasm for literature, science, 
or politics, or of the distraction produced by a rapid 
succession of stimulating pleasures, or of the nobler 
and more generous excitement which springs from 
happy love, there is something wanting ; they know 
not what. There seems to be nothing worth living for. 
They are capable of an enthusiasm which there is 
nothing to excite, of a love and devotion which there 
is nothing to command. At such times, if they catch 
any glimpse of the wealth and fulness of the life which 
is possible to them through Christ, they may be won 
for ever. They may be won if they can be brought 
under the power of any of the grander aspects of the 
Christian revelation, if their hearts can be thrilled by 
its immortal hopes, if they can be stirred with the 
passionate devotion inspired by Christ's infinite love. 
Such persons may be reached by the appeal of the 
gospel to the moral imagination of man and to his 
deeper moral emotions. 

In others there is something to which we can appeal 
that is more definite than this vague restlessness. 



2o6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. [lect. vii. 

The native instincts of their spiritual life are no longer 

latent, and there is a keen solicitude to find God. They 

have half learned the open secret of Nature. They 

know what Wordsworth meant when he said : — 

"And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a senj:e sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

Such men are sometimes idealists in philosophy, 
and read the transcendental poets. But they are con- 
scious that the mysterious Presence escapes them. 
They know that the kingdom of heaven is near to 
them, and are striving to enter in, but somehow they 
are unable. They have to be taught the mystery of 
the new birth. To the pardon of sin and to justifica- 
tion they are as yet indifferent, but they will listen to 
the words of St. John about the eternal life which was 
with the Father and was manifested in Christ. They 
will listen to Christ when He speaks of Himself as the 
Way to the Father and as the true Vine, of which those 
who believe in Him are the branches. They may be 
reached by the mysticism of the gospel. 

There are some, again, who begin to think of God 
through the shame and self- disgust which are the 
result of moral failure and the discovery of moral 
weakness. Their firmest resolutions are broken almost 



LECT. VII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION, 207 

as soon as they are made. They fall under the power 
of the poorest and most ignoble temptations. They 
repent, and fall again. They become alarmed about 
themselves. There is no sense of sin, but there is an 
agony of moral shame, and sometimes they sink into 
moral despair. The gospel which will attract their 
hearts is the assurance that Christ can break the force 
of evil habits and destroy evil passions, and give them 
strength for all moral duty. This gospel they may re- 
ceive before they discover clearly that what conscience 
condemns as vicious God condemns as sinful ; but if 
they walk in the light which comes to them, no matter 
how faint the light may be, it will brighten into perfect 
day. 

Other men, whose moral life is generous and as- 
piring, may approach Christ through those ethical 
precepts of His which require a perfection that is 
altogether impossible apart from the power of the 
Holy Spirit. They have been haunted by thoughts of 
an ideal and romantic goodness ; but Christ's ethical 
precepts and His own character create still fairer and 
loftier visions of what human life might be. When 
they learn that the laws of Christ are promises in 
another form, and that the character of Christ is the 
prophecy of the perfection which is possible to those 
who receive the life of- Christ, their moral enthusiasm 
will be kindled. They have very much to learn before 
they can receive the kingdom of heaven as little 
children ; but if they are in earnest, the humility of 
faith will come at last 



2o8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. [lect. vii. 

There are many who are drawn to Christ by His 
love — drawn to Him, not because they are conscious 
either of moral weakness which His love is eaefer 
to strengthen, or of sin which His love is willing to 
forgive, or of unintelligible cravings which His love 
is able to satisfy — but by the love itself. They are 
drawn to Him as if by the force of moral and spiritual 
gravitation. Children, especially — if I may judge 
from my own observation — are drawn to Christ in this 
way. Whether the opinion is sound which is held by 
very many persons just now, that in nearly all cases it 
is the love of Christ that originates religious thought 
and life, seems to me very doubtful. That the opinion 
should be a common one, is explicable ; for whatever 
may have first awakened religious earnestness, there 
must be an apprehension of the love of Christ before 
it is possible to have faith in Him ; but this is no 
proof that the truths and facts which created the reli- 
gious solicitude were superfluous. And yet it is certain 
that if we could preach about the love of Christ with 
the ardour, the exultation, and the rapture which it 
ought to inspire, there would be something contagious 
in our faith and joy ; if we could preach about it with 
a tenderness like that which He Himself manifested 
to the weak and the sorrowful and the sinful, the hearts 
of men would be melted by it. 

To preach w4th any effectiveness on Christ's love we 
ourselves must be full of the spirit of Christ, and we 
must have a vivid sense of the continuity of Christ's 
life. We must feel, and must make others feel, that 



LECT. VII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. 209 

we have not merely a history to tell, but that the 
Christ of the Gospels is alive ; that He has been living 
through all the centuries which separate our own age 
from the days in which men saw His human face and 
heard His human voice, and that He is living still ; 
that He does not merely reign on some golden throne 
in some remote world, surrounded by shining angels 
and by saints who have fought the good fight and 
received their crown, but that He is still seeking and 
saving the lost ; that in His heavenly glory He has 
lost none of the compassion and gentleness which 
win our affection in the story of His earthly humilia- 
tion ; that the men who were His contemporaries 
were no dearer to Him than the men of later genera- 
tions ; that He is still the very Christ who took the little 
children in His arms and blessed them ; who saw the 
desolation of the poor widow at Nain as she and her 
friends were carrying her only son to the sepulchre, 
and who, without being asked, stopped the sorrowful 
company and restored the young man to His mother ; 
who, when He was reproached for eating with pub- 
licans and sinners, defended Himself in the parable of 
the Prodigal Son ; who wept when He thought of the 
calamities which were coming upon the city that re- 
jected Him ; who endured for us and for our salvation 
the agony of Gethsemane, and the desertion and death 
of the cross. 

" The cross " — this, according to the consent of all 
Churches, and of all the evangelistic traditions of 
Christendom, is the supreme power of the gospel ; and 

15 



2IO THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. [lect. vii. 

the power of the cross is the power of the love of 
Christ. And yet, not of the love of Christ only. For 
the sufferings of Christ were not a mere dramatic dis- 
play of love. " I delivered unto you first of all," said 
St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, "that which I also 
received, how that Christ died for our sins" This 
truth, according to the greatest evangelist among the 
apostles, was one of the chief things, the fundamental 
things, that he made known to those heathen people 
when he preached the gospel to them. It is not 
enough to tell men that Christ died because He loved 
them ; the gospel of the death of Christ includes the 
fact that He died for their sins. Until men know 
what sin is — sin as distinguished from mere natural 
defects and infirmities, which they may attribute to 
their temperament and to the physical constitution 
which they have inherited from their parents ; — sin as 
distinguished from mere deformity which offends their 
ideal of moral grace and beauty ; — sin as distinguished 
from mere vice, which conscience condemns, and 
which, in the absence of any belief in the authority 
or even the existence of the Living God, conscience 
would continue to condemn ; — until, I say, men know 
what sin is they can see no meaning in a large part of 
St. Paul's gospel of the death of Christ. Until they 
are troubled, ashamed, and alarmed by the conscious- 
ness of sin, they will listen to a large part of this 
gospel with moral indifference, or even with moral 
resentment. 

It should therefore be one of the principal objects 






LECT. VII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. 211 

of the Christian preacher to discover how he can 
awaken the sense of guilt. He must be careful to 
avoid all those representations of God which encourage 
men to think that God is indifferent to human sin. 
He must not suffer even the Law of Righteousness to 
come between the conscience and God, but must train 
men to the recognition of the Divine authority over 
human life. To assert the authority of an impersonal 
Law will not create the consciousness of sin. Right- 
eousness is the discharge of those duties which we 
owe to persons ; ^ unrighteousness is the neglect of 
those duties ; and what has been called the " higher 
law" is the law which arises from the relations be- 
tween the human race and the Personal God. The 
Christian preacher must also insist on the ethical view 
of human nature, utterly refusing to make any com- 
promise with theories which dull the sense of human 
responsibility, never losing any legitimate opportunity 
of giving emphasis to the truth that all the dignity 
and shame, the romance and the heroism, the tragedy 
and the glory, of the life of nations and of individual 
men, have their origin in the mysterious prerogative 
of moral freedom. 

Sometimes the sense of guilt may be awakened by 
a deliberate and persistent assault on a particular vice ; 
sometimes by compelling the conscience to pronounce 

^ See " Christianity and Morality:" the Boyle Lectures for 
1874 and 1875. By Henry Wace, M.A. London : Pickering. 
These lectures are, in my judgment, the most valuable contribu- 
tion to English theological thought that has been made for 
many years. 

15 * 



212 THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. [lect. vii. 

judgment on the character of a life which may be free 
from vice, but in which the authority of God counts 
for nothing. Sometimes a vivid presentation of the 
ideal of saintliness will suddenly reveal to m^en the 
contrast between what they are and what they ought 
to be. Sometimes men will become sensible of their 
guilt in the light of the infinite love of God. Some- 
times they will start back with terror and astonish- 
ment and bitter sorrow when they discover that it was 
for their sins that the Christ was forsaken of the Father, 
and died a cruel and shameful death. The death of 
Christ, which is the supreme revelation of the Divine 
love, is also the supreme revelation of human guilt. 

What are we to say of that appeal to fear which 
is denounced with such scorn and vehemence by 
the Christianity that claims to be " liberal," and 
teaches us to bring our religious faith into harmony 
with the spirit of the nineteenth century } I think 
that we have to ask ourselves, first of all, whether 
those who continue in revolt against God, and who 
refuse to receive the Christian redemption, have any- 
thing to fear 1 One of the soundest and noblest 
elements of the intellectual temper of the nineteenth 
century is its respect for facts. The great lesson 
which scientific men have been trying to teach us is 
that we cannot make a universe out of our own heads. 
Of late, indeed, scientific men themselves seem to have 
sometimes forgotten their own lesson ; and by a singu- 
lar Nemesis, some daring scientific speculations on the 
origin and constitution of the universe have recently 






LECT. VII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. 213 

been sharply criticised by Dr. Bridges, one of the chief 
English representatives of orthodox Positivism — not 
of orthodox Christianity — on the ground that they 
violate the fundamental canons of scientific inquiry.' 
Those who describe themselves as " liberal " Christians 
seem to me to be open to criticism of a similar kind. 
We may resent the intrusion of scientific methods into 
the sphere of ethics and religion, but if moralists and 
theologians can learn nothing else from science, they 
should at least learn this — that facts should govern 
speculation, and that if speculation, however brilliant 
and charming, refuses in its pride to acknowledge 
their authority, the facts will always be strong enough 
to hold their own. 

I ask again whether those v/ho continue in revolt 
against God, and who persistently reject the Christian 
redemption, have anything to fear .? Christ spoke 
of " the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not 
quenched." He said that there will be " wailing and 
gnashing of teeth " when the wicked are severed from 
the just and cast into " the furnace of fire ; " that the 
wicked and slothful servant will be driven into the 
darkness without, when the Lord of all returns to hold 
high festival in light and joy with those who have 
served Him loyally ; that when He comes with His 
holy angels and sits on the throne of His glory. He 
will say to the unmerciful, " Depart from me ye cursed." 
St Paul speaks of the "indignation and wrath, 
tribulation and anguish," which are to come upon 
^ See Fortnightly Review for June and July, 1877. 



214 THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. [lect. vii 

those who know the law of God and break it ; and 
warns those that obey not the gospel of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, that they will be " punished with 
everlasting destruction." Had St. Paul any authority 
to declare that this awful doom menaces the impeni- 
tent } He who came to seek and to save the lost — 
was He sure of His own mind when He affirmed that 
when all nations are gathered before Him, He will 
separate them into two companies, and that He will 
pronounce a curse on those who are on His left hand, 
and command them to depart from His presence into 
everlasting fire t Is this His settled purpose } Will 
He carry it out — not shrinking from the awful penalties 
which He threatens to inflict upon those whom He 
condemns } All that we actually know about the future 
— all that we know, as distinguished from what we 
imagine, from what we infer, from what we hope — we 
learn from Him who has brought life and immortality 
to light through the gospel, and who has also declared 
that unimaginable woes are the destiny of the unsaved. 
Is Christ's testimony to be trusted > This is the first 
question which we have to solve. 

About the precise measure and character and 
duration of the evils of which He speaks, you may 
be uncertain. To insist that the lost will be punished 
in material fires, is as irrational as to insist that the 
saved will dwell in a city paved with material gold. 
You may think that the language of Christ and His 
apostles suggests that although the doom of the 
condemned is irrevocable, their sufferings will end in 



LECT, VII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSIL N. 215 

the exhaustion of Hfe and strength, and in a second 
death, from which there will be no resurrection. You 
may even think that possibly there is some reserve in 
the revelation of the eternal future, and that He who 
will first command the wicked to depart from Him, 
will afterwards seek them in the desolation to which 
His own word had banished them, and will strive, not 
without success, to bring them back to light and to God. 
You must interpret the teaching of Christ for your- 
selves, remembering only that you have to discover — 
not what His words may be made to mean, — but what 
they meant ; but however you interpret it, does there 
not remain something very appalling for the im- 
penitent to fear ? And while this remains, is it not a 
ground on which you may rest some of the strongest 
and most effective arguments for renouncing sin, and 
submitting to the authority of God ? 

To rely exclusively, or even chiefly, on terror as an 
instrument of conversion, is no doubt a grave mistake ; 
but if we shrink from speaking of the Divine anger 
which sin provokes, and of the Divine resolution to 
inflict upon the impenitent intolerable punishment, we 
suppress truths which on the lips of wiser, firmer — 
yes, and I will add, more merciful — preachers than our- 
selves, have not only agitated men with alarm, but 
have constrained them to appeal to Christ for deliver- 
ance, at once from sin and from eternal death. There 
is one caution which I will venture to suggest, and I 
will give it in the words of a man who on this sub- 
ject has a right to be heard with exceptional respect. 



21 6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. [lect. vii. 

Mr. Moody once said to me that " a preacher ought 
to have a very tender heart, to speak with any good 
effect about the condition of the lost." 

It was not my intention to attempt a complete ac- 
count of the various elements of man's moral and 
spiritual nature to which the gospel appeals ; I merely 
wanted to illustrate what I meant when I said that in 
our evangelistic preaching we ought to study the con- 
ditions of success. It is not by the monotonous repe- 
tition of a solitary truth, or by putting an incessant 
strain on a solitary motive, that we shall convert all 
sorts of men. It is our duty to consider the manner in 
which the varied contents of the Christian revelation 
affect the varied powers and passions and suscepti- 
bilities of human nature. We ought to try, in turn, 
every possible access to the conscience and the heart. 

In saying this, I have assumed that there is no rigid 
and uniform type to which the spiritual life in its 
origin and development should be compelled to con- 
form. It cannot matter how a man comes to Christ, 
if only he comes. Any motive that brings men to 
Christ is a legitimate motive. Do not permit your- 
selves to be fettered in your preaching by the formal 
conception of an exact succession of experiences 
through which every one that forsakes sin and lives 
for God must necessarily pass. John Bunyan made 
Christian flee from the City of Destruction in great 
terror, and carrying a heavy burden. The poor pil- 
grim sunk deep in the Slough of Despond ; was 



LECT. VII.] NO RIGID TYPE OF CONVERSION. 217 

frightened almost out of his life under the awful rocks 
and flames of Mount Sinai ; carried his dreadful load 
on his weary shoulders long after he had passed 
through the Wicket-gate, and even after he had been 
shown the wonders and mysteries of the Interpreter's 
House. But when Christiana and her children started 
on their pilgrimage, Christiana had very little terror, 
and the children had no terror at all. The boys cried 
before setting out, but it was only because they had 
not gone with their father, and now they wanted to 
follow him. Not one of them sunk into the Slough ; 
not one of them had a load to carry ; and neither the 
cliffs nor the fires of Sinai alarmed them. John Bun- 
yan w^as much wdser than those good men who cannot 
believe that little children are in the right way at all 
unless they can tell the story of how for a time they 
were almost crushed w^ith the sense of guilt, and only 
found peace at the sight of the cross. 

The city of God has twelve gates : every one of 
them is a gate of pearl. What presumption it is to 
insist that unless men enter by a particular gate they 
cannot enter at all ! Let them enter by the gate that 
is nearest to them. Nor should we insist that to 
reach the gate itself there is only one path. Some 
men find their way to it by the high road of duty ; 
some through ravines of gloomy desolation and des- 
pair ; some across pleasant meadows, bright with the 
sunlight of hope and musical with the song of birds. 
When once they are among the happy nations of the 
saved, inside the jasper walls, no one will challenge 



2i8 EVANGELISTIC POWER. [lect. vii. 

their right to a place in the holy city because they 
entered by the wrong gate, or approached the right 
gate by the wrong road. 

If we are to have exceptional success in the con- 
version of men we must have that exceptional form 
of spiritual force which has been granted to some 
great evangelists. " To one is given by the Spirit 
the word of wisdom ; to another the word of know- 
ledge by the same Spirit ; to another faith by the 
same Spirit ; ... to another prophecy ; " to another 
an evangelistic power which seems almost irresistible. 
" All these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, 
dividing to every man severally as he will." In some 
cases this power seems to have come to a man at the 
very beginning of his own religious life ; in others, 
after many years of patient and earnest Christian 
work, which had achieved no extraordinary success ; 
in some cases it has rested upon a man for a time and 
has then been withdrawn. 

I do not know that we have any right to believe 
that this exceptional gift is to be obtained by every 
one that seeks it. Nor do I think, therefore, that if 
we have sought it and not received it, we are bound 
to suppose that the cause lies in our own sin and un- 
belief " For the body is not one member, but many. 
... If the whole body were an eye, where were the 
hearing } If the whole were hearing, where were the 
smelling } . , . And if they were all one member, 
where were the body } " All Christian men are not 



ii 



LECT. VII.] EVANGELISTIC POWER. 219 

called to the ministry. The carpenter and the black- 
smith, the cotton manufacturer and the merchant, the 
physician and the lawyer, the artist, the scholar, and 
the statesman, are all as necessary as ourselves to the 
complete fulfilment of God's idea concerning the 
kingdom of heaven on earth. And all ministers do not 
receive the same spiritual gifts ; for the work which 
they have to do is of different kinds. St. John as a 
saint and an apostle was not inferior either to St. 
Peter or to St. Paul ; but I do not know that we have 
any reason to suppose that his power as an evan- 
gelist was equal to theirs. It has been justly said that 
if St. Peter was the apostle of the circumcision, and 
St. Paul of the uncircumcision, St. John was the 
apostle of the Church. It may be that many of us 
are appointed to forms of service for which extra- 
ordinary evangelistic energy is not necessary. The 
spirit which leads some Christian men to speak dis- 
paragingly of all ministers who are not conspicuous 
for their evangelistic success, is a schismatic spirit. 
Our gifts vary with our functions, " that there should 
be no schism in the body ; but that the members 
should have the same care one of another." Schism 
is schism still, even when it assumes the form of ex- 
ceptional zeal for the evangelisation of the world. 

The man on whom extraordinary evangelistic power 
is conferred must, as a rule, separate himself from the 
ordinary duties of the pastorate. He is appointed to 
other work, and must not decline it. His position is 
one of exceptional honour, and also of exceptional 



220 EVANGELISTIC POWER. [lect. vii. 

peril. He should be strengthened and sustained by 
the constant intercessions of the Church. 

But even those of us who have reason to believe 
that God has called us to walk in obscurer paths, and 
to render Him a less brilliant service, may with rever- 
ence and humility ask for a larger measure of this 
special form of grace than most of us have received. 
God will not rebuke us for presumption if, in the pre- 
sence of vast masses of human ignorance and misery 
and vice and irreligion, on which we are able to make 
hardly any impression, we entreat Him to grant us 
some of the force which He has granted in such a 
wonderful measure to illustrious evangelists. Or if 
for any reason this cannot be, we may still implore 
Him to bestow it on some of our brethren. Whether 
the work is done by ourselves or by others, it matters 
not ; but we ought to pray incessantly that the work 
may be done. 

Meanwhile, our duty is plain. It is for us to work 
with the strength we have, and to work devoutly and 
energetically. Dissatisfaction with our present ser- 
vice, a want of fidelity in the use of the gifts we have 
already received, will incapacitate us for service which 
may seem to us more urgently demanded, and will 
lessen the spiritual power which we actually possess. 
" To him that hath shall be given, and he shall have 
more abundance ; but whosoever hath not, from him 
shall be taken away even that he hath." 



I 



LECTURE VIII. 

PASTORAL PREACHING. 

C"^ ENTLEMEN, — In the course of a very few 
-T years most of you will be pastors of Churches. 
I trust that you will enter upon your ministry with a 
right conception of the relations between yourselves 
and your people. Some ministers appear to think 
that Churches are founded in order to provide salaries 
for mien who wish to master recent speculations on the 
Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, or to study 
at their leisure Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, 
or to make themselves familiar with German litera- 
ture, and to form a judgment on the movement of 
German philosophical thought from Kant to Schopen- 
hauer. There are other men who seem to believe 
that Churches exist to enable them to cultivate and to 
display their own remarkable genius, and that church 
buildings are erected to assist them to win a reputation. 
In the discourses which they are good enough to 
deliver every week, they suppose that they will 
discharge their duty if they report the results of their 
private studies, and show with what richness of 
imagination, what humour, what wit, what originality 
of thought, what beauty and vigour of style they can 



222 MINISTERS EXIST FOR CHURCHES, [lect. viii. 

discuss any moral or religious subject in which they 
happen to feel a personal interest. These men are 
often betrayed by their immeasurable egotism and 
intellectual conceit into the most grotesque follies. 
Their sense of the immense importance of everything 
that concerns themselves and their sermons appears 
in their bearing and in their conversation in private, 
and not unfrequently finds its expression in the pulpit. 
Unhappily a preacher of this kind, if he has any 
power — no matter how inconsiderable — too often at- 
tracts a number of foolish people, who confirm him 
in the opinion that he is one of the greatest and most 
distinguished of mankind, and that his sermons take 
rank with the great historical events of the century. 
I shall not be so discourteous as to suppose that it is 
necessary to warn you against the grosser kinds 
of ministerial selfishness ; but I trust that you will 
always remember that ministers exist for Churches — 
not Churches for ministers. 

There is a certain measure of respect due from the 
people to their pastor ; you are most likely to receive 
it if you do not claim it ; you will never receive it at 
all if you forget that there is a certain measure of 
respect due from the pastor to the people. There is 
an authority belonging to the man who holds the 
ministerial office — an authority hard to define, but the 
recognition of which is essential to the peace of the 
Church and to its vigorous action. This authority 
will be most frankly and loyally conceded if you do 
not ostentatiously assert it. It will be refused if you 



LECT. VIII.] SECURE CONFIDENCE. 223 

do not habitually recognise the authority belonging 
to the Church. 

One of your jEirst objects should be to secure the 
confidence of your people. They will get very little 
good from your preaching unless they trust you. 
You and they are to work together ; mutual trust is 
indispensable if you are to work together happily. 
To secure their confidence it is not enough that you 
deserve it. There are some young ministers who are 
upright, unselfish, chivalrous, devout, loyal to Christ, 
and who yet put a very severe strain on the generosity 
of their congregations. They thoughtlessly and wan- 
tonly provoke suspicion. So far as the substance 
of their creed is concerned, it is precisely identical 
with the creed of the people to whom they are 
preaching. But the form is different ; and by their 
incessant attacks on what they suppose to be the 
unsatisfactory form in which the truth is commonly 
held, they create the impression that they reject the 
truth itself This is sheer folly. The truth is greater 
than their particular intellectual conception and de- 
finition and theory of it. This they seem to forget, 
and the result is that they surround themselves with 
an atmosphere of distrust. They ought to make it 
clear that they have no new gospel to preach, though 
they may preach it in a new language. And even 
if, in connection with the central and fundamental 
truths of the Christian faith, raany of their people 
hold what they believe to be pernicious errors, they 
will act wisely if, before attacking the errors, they 



224 THE EVANGELIST AND THE PASTOR, [lect. viii. 

have placed their own loyalty to the truth beyond 
suspicion. 

Most of you, as I have said, are to be pastors of 
Churches — not missionaries or evangelists. You will 
have to preach to congregations largely composed of 
persons who already confess the authority of the Lord 
Jesus Christ, and who are trying to live a Christian life. 
The work of the evangelist and the work of the pastor 
are not, indeed, so different in fact as they are in 
theory ; for many sermons which have for their direct 
aim the conversion of men who have not yet come 
home to God, strengthen the faith and increase the 
religious earnestness of those who have lived for 
thirty or forty years in the light of God's presence ; 
and, on the other hand, sermons which are intended to 
give courage and guidance to those who are already 
seeking "by patient continuance in well-doing . . . 
for glory, honour, and immortality," sometimes alarm 
the conscience, and touch the heart of the impenitent. 
But it is quite clear that you would make a grave 
mistake if you always preached as though no one 
in your congregation had ever heard of the gospel 
before. As pastors, you will have to instruct your 
Churches in religious truth and duty. 

In England there is an impression that modern 
sermons are generally defective in the element of 
instruction. Whether the impression is correct or 
not, I cannot tell ; if it is, I think that the fault lies 
with the Churches themselves as well as with the 
preachers. If there is to be teaching in the pulpit, 



\ 



LECT. VIII.] THE PEOPLE AT FAULT. 225 

there must be intellectual activity in the pew ; and 
there are some good Christian people in England 
who have yet to learn that they ought to serve God not 
only "with the spirit/' but "with the understanding 
also." One Sunday morning, when I was a lad, I 
heard an excellent minister offer the prayer that God 
would grant the congregation during that day " in- 
tellectual repose," and I am inclined to think that 
very many of the people silently said Amen. It may 
be different in America, but with us there are many 
congregations that seem to have lost the habit of 
caring for solid teaching. Describe a thunderstorm, 
or a cataract, or a shipwreck ; move them to tears by 
a touching story of human sorrow ; give wings to your 
fancy, and carry the people far away into quiet glens, 
where the bright waters murmur softly over their 
rocky bed, where the foxglove blossoms, where the 
bee hums among the wild thyme, and the gorgeous 
dragon-fly hovers over the fern, and they think you 
one of " the finest preachers " in the country, though 
they are no wiser when the sermion ends than when 
it began. God forbid that I should depreciate the 
music of graceful speech, or the beauty and pomp 
of an imaginative eloquence ; but for a nation's life, 
corn-fields and rich pastures are more precious than 
the romantic beauty of lonely lakes or the stern 
sublimity of the mountains which rise above them ; 
and that preaching is barren and worthless which has 
no other object than to excite transient emotion, to 
stimulate the imagination, or to gratify the fancy, 

16 



226 TEACH THE PEOPLE. [lect. viii. 

It is not our business to get a reputation for being 
" fine preachers ;" and if we are honest enough, manly 
enough, and, above all. Christian enough, to care less 
about winning a hasty and transient popularity than 
about doing real service to the Church, I believe that 
there is no congregation whose taste is so hopelessly 
corrupt, and whose intellectual life is so completely 
demoralised, that it may not be trained to value 
sermons which are full of instruction. All that is 
necessary is that the preacher should have courage, 
earnestness, patience, and a moderate amount of skill. 
He must not attempt too much at first; he must not 
preach dry sermons ; he must learn how to teach — an 
art which can be acquired only by practice ; and then 
he will find that to create in his congregation a keen 
interest in ethical and religious truth is less difficult 
than, perhaps, he supposed. I do not mean that 
sermons addressed to Christian people should be 
simply didactic. The formation of right moral habits 
and the discipline of the spiritual life should be the 
supreme objects of pastoral preaching ; but ethical 
and religious knowledge is worth having for its own 
sake, and in the absence of it we have no reason to 
look for the development of the higher forms of moral 
and spiritual character. 

In the Holy Scriptures we have the record of a long 
succession of supernatural revelations. Have we any 
reason to believe that even intelligent Christian men 
and women read the Scriptures intelligently } Do 
not many excellent persons seem to suppose that 



LECT. VIII.] OJV READING THE BIBLE. 227 

if they read a chapter in the Bible, whether they 
understand it or not, they have performed a religious 
duty, and are certain to receive religious benefit ? In 
the Epistles, and even in the Gospels — to say nothing 
of the Old Testament prophecies — are there not 
many words, many phrases, whole sentences, long pa- 
ragraphs, to which people who have been reading 
the Bible all their lives attach no meaning at all ? 
When they are reading chapters with which they are 
most familiar, do they not come to crevasse after 
crevasse, over which they have to leap as best they 
can ? And yet these very people have been listening 
twice a week for thirty or forty or fifty years to the 
discourses of men whose function it is to explain, 
illustrate, and enforce the contents of Holy Scripture. 
Something might be done to lessen this ignorance 
if the lessons which commonly have a place in the 
order of public worship were selected more systemati- 
cally, and were read with greater care. I acknowledge 
that to read the Bible well is not easy. The way in 
which our Bibles are printed creates a mechanical 
difficulty of a kind more serious than might be im- 
agined : it would be hard to read Macaulay or 
Addison well if the " History of England " and the 
" Spectator '' were cut up into verses. There is a 
graver difficulty. Our authorised version has great 
merits ; but even when the translation is accurate and 
intelligible, the English is not the English of our own 
times. The structure of the sentences and the order 
of the words differ from the modern structure and the 

16' 



228 MR. DA IV SON'S READING. [lect. viir. 

modern order. The style which we can read most 
easily and naturally is the style in which we and the 
people about us are constantly writing and speaking. 
This is not the style of the English Bible, and hence 
we find it hard to read the Bible with the right 
emphasis and the true cadence. 

I have heard several men who read the Bible well ; 
I never heard but one who read it supremely well. 
This was the late Mr. Dawson, of Birmingham, to 
whom I referred in a former lecture. To quote words 
of my own from a recent article in the Nineteenth 
Centnry :^ — " It was genuine reading, not dramatic 
recitation — the dramatic recitation of the Bible is 
irreverent and offensive. But if he was reading a 
narrative he read it, not indeed as if he were telling 
the story himself, but as if he, too, had seen what he 
was reading about, and as if, while he read, the whole 
story lived again in his imagination and in his heart. 
If he was reading a psalm, he read it, not as some 
men read a psalm — as though they had written it — 
which is the dramatic style, and which seems to me 
false in art and morally presumptuous ; but while he 
was reading you felt as if the words of the Psalmist 
recalled to him the brightest and the saddest passages 
in his own history, and as if these personal experiences 
naturally led him to read with a tone and an emphasis 
which were in perfect sympathy with the Psalmist's 
thought and feeling." To read in this way is not 
possible to most of us. It requires a rare combination 
I Nineteenth Century^ August, 1877. 



LECT. VIII.] BOW TO READ THE BIBLE. 229 

of powers. But we should try to do our best. If we 
master the meaning of the passages we intend to read 
in public ; if we so fully enter into the spirit of what 
we are reading that the printed book vanishes, and 
the story it tells comes to us fresh from the man that 
wrote it ; if we read a psalm as though we ourselves 
had heard it from the lips of David, and as if the 
broken tones in which he confessed his sin, or the 
triumphant joy with which he spoke of the goodness 
of God, were still lingering in our ears ; if we read a 
prophecy of Isaiah's with the feeling which the words 
would excite if we ourselves had listened to him while 
he was denouncing the crimes of his contemporaries 
and predicting the glories of the future kingdom 
of God ; and if we read a passage from St. Paul's 
Epistle to the Galatians with that perfect sympathy 
with the sorrow and anger of the Apostle which will 
be create i by a vivid realisation of his fierce conflict 
with the Judaizers ; if, in short, by a vigorous imagina- 
tive effort we place ourselves by the very side of the 
men who wrote the Bible, see what they saw and feel 
what they felt, our mere reading of the Scriptures will 
throw an intense light on every passage that the people 
understood before, and will often bring out the meaning 
of passages which they had been accustomed to pass 
over as being quite unintelligible. 

When I began my ministry it was my custom to 
preach expository sermons, in which I carefully ex- 
plained and illustrated, clause by clause, verse by 



230 EXPOSITOR V PRE A CIIING. [lect. v i i i. 

verse, a group of chapters or a complete book of 
Holy Scripture. Of late I hav^e adopted what seems 
to me a better method. In the earlier part of the 
service I read a dozen or twenty verses — sometimes 
more, sometimes less — of the book I am expounding, 
beginning, of course, where I left off on the previous 
Sunday, and often prefacing the reading with a brief 
summary of what has gone before. Sometimes I 
venture to make a change in the translation, if I 
am quite sure that the translation is inaccurate, or 
that the change will make the meaning plainer or 
more vivid. If there are any sentences which are at 
all obscure, I give brief explanatory comments. If 
there are any allusions which ordinary people are not 
likely to notice, and which it is necessary to recognise 
in order to catch the writer's thought, I illustrate these 
allusions. When the whole passage is clear and 
intelligible, I read it without explanatory comments, 
for to explain what requires no explanation will 
perplex people instead of instructing them. Even 
in this case I often fasten on a particular verse or a 
particular phrase, and show how it annihilates some 
common error, or strengthens the evidence of some 
great truth, or rebukes some sin, or suggests a solemn 
or pathetic motive to the exercise of some Christian 
virtue. 

The text of the sermon is selected from the passage 
which I have read, unless the passage would receive 
effective illustration from a text taken from another 
part of the Bible. If the passage is a consecutive 



LECT. VIII. ] EXPOSITOR Y PRE A CHING. 23 1 

argument in support of any doctrine, or an exhorta- 
tion to the discharge of a moral or rehgious duty, or 
the expression of any sentiment or emotion — this doc- 
trine, duty, emotion, or sentiment, is generally the 
subject of the sermon. If the passage treats of a suc- 
cession of truths or duties, it is sometimes my endea- 
vour to show how they are related to each other ; 
sometimes I take one of them and leave the rest. 
Occasionally the sermon consists of a review of the 
contents of three or four chapters which have been 
read on previous Sundays. Sometimes when I have 
finished a book I have given a summary of the whole 
of it. I found that a summary of the Epistle to the 
Galatians was quite as exciting as a fiery pamphlet 
on some question of modern party politics. 

The advantages of this method of exposition over 
that which I used to follow in the earlier years of my 
ministry seem to me to be very great. It is possible 
to get over the ground more rapidly. I never made 
such slow progress as the German exegetical professor, 
who, after lecturing on the Book of Isaiah for rather 
more than twenty years, had reached the middle of 
the second chapter ; but I have the impression that I 
was two or three years getting through the first eight 
chapters of the Epistle to the Romans. With my 
present method I began the Epistle in April, 1876, 
reached the end of the eighth chapter in October of 
the same year, though I had been away for six weeks 
in the summer, and in February, 1877, the Epistle 
was finished. 



232 EXPOSITORY PREACHING. [lect. viii. 

This method of exposition seems to me more effec- 
tive, as well as more rapid. Our practice of preaching 
from texts has accustomed people to try what they 
can discover in single sentences, and even single 
phrases, of the Bible, and to disregard the general 
current and structure of the argument or history : 
the minute exposition of clause after clause will con- 
firm their evil habit. They seem to think that the 
best way to get a right conception of the Rhine, or of 
the Falls of Niagara, is to examine separate drops of 
the water under a microscope. The expository method 
which I have followed for some years past is likely, I 
think, to lead people to read the Bible as they read 
other books, and to look not merely at separate 
thoughts and fragments of separate thoughts, at iso- 
lated facts and the most insignificant circumstances 
connected with isolated facts,, but at facts and 
thoughts in masses, and as they are grouped by the 
Scriptural writers themselves. 

Exposition will do something to protect you from 
the desultoriness and want of method which is one of 
the gravest faults of our modern preaching, and which 
is one of the chief causes that it conveys so little de- 
finite and systematic instruction ; but the fault is so 
serious that you ought, I think, to guard against it in 
other ways. Once, at least, in the course of a year, a 
Christian preacher should preach a sermon on such 
topics as the Humanity of our Lord, His Divinity, the 
Atonement, Justification by Faith, the Personality and 



LECT. VIII.] DOCTRINAL PREACHING. 233 

Work of the Holy Spirit, Regeneration, Prayer, the 
Future Judgment, and its awful and glorious results. 
We assume that persons who are accustomed to read 
the Bible and to listen to Christian preaching are sure 
to have a just conception of these great elementary 
truths. But the incidental allusions to them which 
occur in our sermons, the fragmentary illustrations of 
them which are suggested by texts in which they are 
presented under a special aspect, the references we 
make to them in order to enforce moral and spiritual 
duties, will never enable the people to form a clear 
and definite conception of them. It is a good habit to 
draw up at the beginning of the year a list of topics 
of this kind, on which we ought to preach before the 
year runs out, to refer to it from time to time, and when 
we preach upon any of the selected subjects, to write 
the date against it. 

Both in your expository and in your doctrinal preach- 
ing it will be necessary to remember that the interest 
which you feel in certain intricate and difficult ques- 
tions is largely the result of your professional studies. 
Some young preachers forget this. They have been 
investigating the controversies which culminated in 
the Council of Nicaea ; or they have tried to master 
the philosophy of the theologians of Alexandria ; or 
they have been reading Thomas Aquinas ; or working 
hard at Turretin, Maestricht, and Episcopius ; or they 
have become penetrated with the spirit and method 
of Schleiermacher ; or, at least, they have been studying 



234 DO NOT BE PROFESSIONAL. [lect. viir. 

closely the writings of American and English authors 
whose speculations are as yet unfamiliar to most 
educated men who are not professional theologians. 
As the result of their reading, and of their strenuous 
thinking on the deeper questions of theological science, 
they have a vehement interest in controversies which 
to large numbers of their hearers appear trivial or are 
absolutely unintelligible. To introduce controversies 
of this kind into the pulpit is preposterous. No genius 
or eloquence will induce most of your people to care 
for them. 

I know what your reply will be. You will say that 
these controversies ultimately affect our way of con- 
ceiving the most elementary truths of the Christian 
faith. It is equally true that certain difficult branches 
of astronomical science have a great deal to do with 
the navigation of a ship, and that the latest biological 
speculations may throw a great deal of light on the 
growth of barley and the breeding of sheep. But it 
does not follow that a man must be a great astrono- 
mer before he can be qualified to take the command 
of a White Star or a Cunard steamer ; nor does 
it follow that a man must master the latest books 
on biology before he can be a good farmer. The 
scientific theology which as a minister you have to 
master for yourself is something different from the 
popular and practical theology which alone you can 
teach your people — no matter how intelligent, no 
matter how cultivated they may be. You must be 
willing to accumulate a large amount of learning of 



LECT. rai.] THE PASTOR MORE THAN A TEACHER. 235 

which you can make no display in the pulpit, and to 
carry on long and laborious processes of thought 
which will make no show in your sermons. 

What is true of doctrine is also true of exegesis. In 
Meyer's "Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans " 
he is incessantly discussing and refuting the interpre- 
tations of Hofmann ; but the people in your congre- 
gation never heard of Hofmann, and Hofmann's 
interpretations are never likely to occur to them. For 
you to discuss Hofmann's exegesis in the pulpit, be- 
cause it has interested you in your study, would be to 
show that you had yet to learn the most elementary 
principles of the art of teaching. 

But as a pastor you will be very much more than a 
teacher. You will have to cultivate the religious life 
of your people. This will be one of your gravest 
duties, and it will be one that ought to occasion you 
the most anxious thought. It must have occurred to 
you already that in the history of the Church the 
spiritual life has at different times and in different 
countries taken very different forms. The deep, central 
elements of sorrow for sin, consciousness of spiritual 
weakness apart from the life and strength of God, 
trust in the Divine mercy, love for Christ, earnest desire 
to do the Divine will, have been present everywhere 
and always. But just as a flower varies in the form 
of its leaf and the tint of its blossom according to the 
soil in which it Is planted and the climate with which 
it is surrounded, so these permanent elements of the 



236 TYPES OF RELIGIOUS LIFE. [lect. viii. 

Christian life have manifested themselves in different 
types of character according to the influences which 
have controlled and stimulated their development. 
Unless you believe — which would surely be somewhat 
presumptuous — that in the Church to which you 
happen to belong the religious life has at last assumed 
its perfect form, you will be anxious to learn in what 
it differs from the deepest and most vigorous piety 
of other Churches, other countries, and other centu- 
ries. Your sermons, your prayers, your intercourse 
with your people, will largely determine the colour 
and complexion of their religious character. The 
truths upon which you preach most frequently, the 
advice which you give to your congregation about the 
culture of devout affections and the formation of 
moral and spiritual habits, the characteristic elements 
and prevailing spirit of your public prayers, must 
powerfully affect for good or evil the growth of their 
religious life. You may give it too much sunshine 
or too much shade ; you may shelter it too much, or 
may expose it to winds too rough and cold; you may 
let it grow too luxuriantly, or may prune it with too 
relentless a hand. 

Would it not be wise to study the principal types of 
the spiritual life as they are represented in the few 
great devotional books which have won their way to 
the very hearts of Christian men t I refer to such 
books as Augustine's " Confessions," the " De Imita- 
tione," Francis de Sales' "Devout Life," the "Spiritual 
Exercises " of Ignatius, Jeremy Taylor's " Holy 



LECT. YLii.] TYPES OF RELIGIOUS LIFE. 237 

Living," Pascal's "Pensees," Richard Baxter's " Saint's 
Rest," John Bunyan's "Grace Abounding" and "Pil- 
grim's Progress." You might extend your reading 
to such books as Bishop Hall's " Christ Mystical," 
John Owen's " Spiritual-Mindedness," John Howe's 
" Blessedness of the Righteous," Law's " Spiritual 
Call," and Doddridge's " Rise and Progress." If there 
are any books of the same popular kind which have 
exerted a similar influence on the religious life of the 
Churches of this country, these too should receive your 
careful attention. Their popularity is a proof that 
they represent the religious ideal which fascinated 
the popular mind, and that their writers were in the 
main stream of the popular life and sympathies. 

Among the considerations which books like these 
would suggest, will be the different results produced 
by the different degrees of prominence which have 
been given at different times to particular elements of 
the Christian creed. The great truths concerning the 
nature of God — such as the Trinity and the doctrines 
implicated in the Incarnation; the great truths con- 
cerning human ^redemption — such as the Atonement 
and Justification; the great truths concerning the per- 
sonal realisation of redemption — such as the New Birth 
through the power of the Holy Ghost ; have all at 
various times and in various places exerted supreme 
influence over the development of the religious life ; 
and it is an inquiry full of interest to discover the 
varying results. 

There are inquiries of another kind which will be 



238 TYPES OF RELIGIOUS LIFE. [lect. viii. 

suggested by such books as those to which I have 
referred. You will be led to investigate the true 
limits within which self-examination should be con- 
fined, and the evils which the soul suffers from habitual 
introversion. You will consider how far asceticism is 
a legitimate and healthy aid to Christian living — that 
is, how far we may attempt to escape from sin by 
avoiding the occasions of sin, and how far we should 
trust for safety to the victorious power of the higher 
life of the soul, or, rather, to the victorious power of 
the Spirit of Christ. You will ask what are the 
natural and inevitable effects of certain spiritual 
maxims which have been accepted as self-evident by 
many eminent saints — as that the love of God is the 
only right motive of human action, a maxim which 
appears to me to be a direct impeachment of the 
righteousness of Him who gave us this strangely 
complicated nature, and a formal repeal of the law 
that in addition to loving God we are to love our 
neighbour as ourselves. You will consider to what 
extent conflicting theological systems such as Calvin- 
ism and Arminianism have received a practical veri- 
fication from their effects on the spiritual life ; what 
are the truths which, concealed under monstrous 
errors like that of Transubstantiation, have exerted a 
wonderful and ennobling influence on many devout 
souls ; what are the causes which have given to 
Methodism its fervour, to Quakerism its practical 
Christian benevolence, and to the best type of Angli- 
canism its sobriety and reverence. 



LECT. VIII.] SPIRITUAL ''PROVINCIALISM:' 239 

These studies will give depth and energy to your 
own religious earnestness. They will save you, in 
the temper and spirit of your religious life, from that 
which in the intellectual life has been called Pro- 
vincialism. They will protect you from being mastered 
and fascinated by writers and preachers who from time 
to time produce a very powerful impression by the 
exhibition of isolated aspects of spiritual truth which, 
because they are isolated, have many of the effects of 
the worst and most pernicious errors. 

These studies will have a most important relation 
to your preaching. They will enrich your knowledge 
of the laws, the perils, and the triumphs of the 
spiritual life, and they will do something to prevent 
you from treating the spiritual life of your people 
unwisely. There are, I believe, few congregations, 
at least in England, in which some persons may not 
be found whose religious nature has received serious 
and permanent injury from the very intensity of 
earnestness with which they have endeavoured to 
translate into practice false ideals of Christian cha- 
racter, empirical theories of the nature of holiness, 
and artificial methods of spiritual discipline. These 
unhappy people are likely to enter into the kingdom 
of heaven halt and maimed through the want of 
larger spiritual wisdom on the part of their religious 
teachers. Our work lies with the soul of man in its 
Divine relations, and we shall not do our work in- 
telligently and effectively unless we give a considerable 
measure of time and thought to the investigation of 



240 THE TRUE IDEAL. [lect. viii. 

the various phases which the spiritual Hfe has assumed 
in the history of Christendom. 

It is hardly necessary for me to remind you that 
for the Divine ideal of Christian character our ultimate 
authority is the New Testament. We have no right 
to be satisfied with striving to create in ourselves or 
others those forms of moral and spiritual excellence 
which happen to be sustained by the tradition and the 
general sentiment of the Church of which we are 
members, or which have kindled our imagination as 
they are illustrated in the writings and lives of the 
saints of other Churches. You will study, both for 
your own sake and for the sake of your people, the life 
of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is at once the law 
and the promise of Christian perfection ; and you will 
endeavour so to preach that your people shall "abide" 
in Him by faith, by love, and by loyal obedience to 
His commandments. You will also endeavour to recon- 
struct for yourselves that conception of the Christian 
character which is suggested by the precepts, the 
prayers, the thanksgivings, and the incidental dis- 
closures of the personal life of the apostles, in the 
epistles of the New Testament. 

We ought not to take it for granted that most 
Christian people know what they ought to be, and 
that all they need is constancy and strength to live 
up to their knowledge. Some important elements 
seem to be suppressed in the common ideal of Chris- 
tian perfection. Take a single illustration. In St. 
Paul's account of " the fruits of the Spirit," he gives 






LECT. VIII.] JOY A DUTY. 241 

the first place to Love, and we acknowledge that a 
Christian man who has an unloving, ungenerous, 
unkindly heart, is hardly a Christian at all. But he 
gives the second place to Joy, and it is my impression 
that there are many of us who seldom think of Joy as 
a necessary and indispensable element in our con- 
ception of a saint. We ask God to forgive us for our 
evil thoughts and evil temper, but rarely, if ever, ask 
Him to forgive us for our sadness. Joy is regarded 
as a happy accident of the Christian life, an ornament 
and a luxury, rather than a duty. We forget that we 
are commanded to " rejoice evermore." It should be 
one of the objects of our ministry to deepen and 
heighten the joy of Christian hearts, as well as to 
strengthen reverence for God's authority and to in- 
crease the fervour of zeal for His glory. 

In trying to cultivate Christian perfection, we must 
not satisfy ourselves with censuring people for being 
imperfect. You will not do much towards sanctifying 
your people by scolding them. Perpetual fault-finding 
does no good : it is bad for children, bad for servants, 
and it is bad for Churches. It is mere indolence, 
and it is sometimes ill-temper, which leads a minister 
to indulge in perpetual condemnation. Nor will you 
do much if you merely tell the people over and over 
again that they ought to be better. Men are not to 
be worried into goodness. You remember Mrs. 
Poyser's description of the two parsons of Hayslope. 
"You know she would have her word about every- 
thing — she said Mr. Irwine was like a good meal 

17 



242 MRS. POYSER'S PARSONS. [lect. viir 

o' victual, you were the better for him without 
thinking on it ; and Mr. Ryde was like a dose o' 
physic, he gripped you and worreted you, and after 
all he left you much the same." ^ Mr. Ryde has 
many followers — preachers who give their congrega- 
tions all " physic " and no " victual." The physic 
may be excellent of its kind, admirable if prescribed 
occasionally. But physic, week after week, all the year 
round ; physic every Sunday morning at eleven, and 
every Sunday evening at half-past six ; physic again 
at the prayer - meeting on Wednesday or Thursday 
night — ugh! — it is intolerable. It is pernicious as 
well as offensive. It is enough to ruin the health of 
the most vigorous Church. 

Let your congregation have the " Bread of Life." 
Instead of merely complaining to them of the absence 
of brotherly kindness, preach sermons which are likely 
to make them more vividly conscious that they are 
brethren in Christ. Instead of satisfying yourself with 
finding fault with them for their want of zeal, ask how 
you can stimulate it. Speak sharp words occasionally 
in condemnation of covetousness, but return again 
and again to those parts of the gospel which inspire 
generosity. Deplore, if you must, the inconstancy 
of many Christian people in right-doing, the languor 
of their spiritual affections, their indifference to the 
supreme objects of the Christian life ; but remember 
that mere lamentations will work no deliverance for 
them. You must consider by what truths, by what 
^ George Eliot : "Adam Bede," p. 157. (One volume edition.) 



LECT. viiL] '' MORAL" SERMONS. 243 

method and spirit of teaching, you can develop among 
them all the energetic forces and all the noble ex- 
cellences of the Christian character. 

I wonder whether you have in America any Chris- 
tian people who resent what are contemptuously de- 
scribed as " Moral " sermons. There were, I believe, 
many such people in England thirty years ago, and 
though it has never been my ill fortune to meet with 
them, I am told that a few of their descendants may 
still be found in some obscure Churches. Whether 
sermons of this kind are resented or not, they are 
necessary. The distinction between moral duties and 
religious duties is a convenient one, but it is mislead- 
ing. The very same authority that requires us to 
believe in the Lord Jesus Christ requires us to be 
just, truthful, temperate, and industrious. The prac- 
tice of the common virtues is as essential a part 
of Christian obedience as the habit of prayer and the 
culture of the spiritual affections. There may be 
morality where there is no religion ; but that there 
should be religion where there is no morality, is im- 
possible. The moral law is the law of God. 

It is therefore just as much our duty to illustrate 
and enforce the obligations of morality as it is to insist 
on the necessity of believing the gospel We have to 
teach men the will of God ; and we have no more 
right to suppress that part of the will of God which 
relates to duties which are called moral than we have 
to suppress that part of the will of God which relates 
to duties which are called religious. 

17* 



244 *' MORAL'' SERMONS. [lect. viii. 

If we require any authoritative sanction for moral 
preaching we may appeal to the example of our Lord 
Jesus Christ. But the people who object to preaching 
of this kind would probably reply that what they delight 
to call the " Old Covenant," and the " Covenant of 
Works/' was not abolished till Christ died for the sins 
of men, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. 
They have a secret conviction that though the Sermon 
on the Mount might be very well for Jews, it is not 
spiritual enough for Christians ; and I think that if 
they had their wish, the first three Gospels, if not the 
fourth, would be bound up with the Old Testament 
instead of with the New. Well, we must meet men on 
their own ground, and if the authority of Christ is not 
decisive, we must ask them whether St. Paul mis- 
understood the spirit and genius of the Christian dis- 
pensation. If moral teaching is out of place in a 
modern sermon, had it any right to a place in an 
apostolic epistle } St. Paul wrote about lying, anger, 
malice, covetousness ; about the duties of masters and 
servants, parents and children. It is difficult to under- 
stand why we should be guilty of a " legal " spirit 
when we preach against the vices which St. Paul 
condemned, or enforce the duties which St. Paul 
commanded. 

It may be said that St. Paul was writing to 
people who had been recently converted from heath- 
enism, and whose consciences had not yet been trained 
to the recognition of the sinfulness of vices which were 
sanctioned by the common opinion of their heathen 



LECT. VTii]. '' MORAL'' SERMONS. 245 

fellow-countrymen ; and, like converts from heath- 
enism in our own times, they did not discover at once 
the obligation of even those ordinary virtues which in 
Christian countries are enforced by the moral judgment 
of the whole community. It is unnecessary to con- 
sider to what extent it is true that the public opinion 
of Thessalonica, Colosse, and Ephesus approved the 
vices which St. Paul condemns in his letters to the 
Churches in those great cities. It is clear that St. 
Paul did not believe that faith in Christ rendered 
moral instruction unnecessary. And if the moral 
ideal of the Christians of apostolic times was cor- 
rupted and degraded by the false moral judgments of 
that heathen society with which they were in per- 
petual contact, we have to ask whether even in 
countries like America and England the ethics of 
public opinion are identical with the ethics of Christ } 
whether it can be assumed as a matter of course that 
no American and no Englishman has anything to 
learn from the moral teaching of the New Testament t 
The slightest knowledge of mankind is sufficient to 
prove to us that even in countries like our own it is 
possible for the conscience to be most imperfectly 
developed. In the world and in the Church men 
mean well and act badly. In both there is a lamentable 
ignorance of moral duty. 

Where moral duty is recognised it is not always 
discharged, even by Christian people. Through force 
of habit, perhaps unconsciously, they distinguish be- 
tween duty and duty. One duty they dare not 



246 ''MORAL" SERMONS. [lect. viii. 

neglect, another they neglect constantly without any 
keen compunction. Sins of one class they suppose 
to be utterly inconsistent with loyalty to Christ ; sins 
of another class they have come to regard as being 
mere infirmities — infirmities to be regretted, infirmities 
which mar, no doubt, the perfection of Christian cha- 
racter ; infirmities for which they need God's forgive- 
ness ; but still mere infirmities, which may be tolerated 
without imperilling their eternal salvation. Some 
habits their consciences condemn only occasionally ; 
weeks and months go by and these habits are un- 
rebuked. Some of Christ's moral precepts they seem 
to regard as " counsels of perfection," intended for 
great saints, but having no relation to the lives of 
common Christian people. Or they even suppose 
that there were some of His precepts which He never 
expected would be kept, and which were meant — not 
to givQ form to our righteousness — but to deepen our 
consciousness of sin. It is certain — we may learn it 
from observation, we may learn it from our personal 
experience — that the Divine life which comes to a 
man when he is regenerated does not at once trans- 
form the whole character. He may be guilty of many 
moral offences which his conscience does not condemn ; 
or the authority of his conscience may be feeble, and 
he may make no serious effort to escape from moral 
habits which he knows are sinful. In our ethical 
preaching we must deal both with moral ignorance 
and with the want of moral earnestness. 

We must be careful to avoid the tendency to dwell 



LECT. VIII.] PAGAN VIRTUES, 247 

exclusively on those virtues which Christianity re- 
deemed from dishonour or from neglect, or which, 
through their nearer kinship to the characteristic 
spirit of the Christian faith, have flourished with ex- 
ceptional vigour in the Christian Church. Humility, 
meekness, gentleness; the charity that "suffereth long 
and is kind, . . . envieth not, . . . beareth all things, 
believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all 
things ; " are specifically Christian virtues, and if we 
ever preach on morals these virtues are almost certain 
to receive attention. Nor are we likely to fail in insist- 
ing on the obligations of temperance and purity; for the 
traditional sentiment of the Church is irreconcilably 
hostile to the opposite vices. But there are virtues 
which Paganism recognised, and these are equally 
necessary to the completeness of the Christian cha- 
racter. To these, neither the teaching nor what may 
be called the public opinion of the Church has given 
adequate prominence, and it is part of our duty to 
reassert their authority. You will remember the ac- 
count which Mr. John Stuart Mill gives in his Auto- 
biography of the moral training which he received 
from his father. It was the training of a pagan. His 
father's moral convictions, as he tells us in the passage 
to which I am referring, were " wholly dissevered from 
religion," and " were very much of the character of 
those of the Greek philosophers." " My father's moral 
inculcations," says Mr. Mill, " were at all times mainly 
those of the ' Socratici viri : ' justice, temperance (to 
which he gave a very extended application), veracity, 



248 PAGAN VIRTUES. [lect. viii. 



perseverance ; readiness to encounter pain, and es- 
pecially labour; regard for the public good ; estimation 
of persons according to their merits, and of things ac- 
cording to their usefulness ; a life of exertion, in con- 
tradiction to one of self-indulgent ease and sloth."i 

Throughout these lectures I have suffered under 
the disadvantage of knowing very little about the life 
of American Churches. From the evils with which 
I am familiar at home you may be free. But in 
England there are many Christian men and women 
who seem to ignore the obligation to cultivate these 
heathen virtues. They have no conception that a 
life of indolent ease is an unchristian life ; that the 
instability of character — as distinguished from mere 
physical weakness — which betrays itself in a perpetual 
change of pursuit, and an incapacity to sustain for long 
together the pressure of any kind of work, is a moral 
fault ; that cowardice is not meekness ; that neglect 
of public duty and absorption in the quiet pleasures 
of home, instead of being a proof of unworldliness 
of spirit, is a proof of selfishness ; that a man may be 
very kindly and yet very unjust, generous with his 
money and ungenerous in his spirit. Some people, in 
short, who pass for very good Christians would be 
very poor pagans. If you have people of this kind 
in America, you will feel the necessity of preaching 
on what we call the masculine virtues, although I 
have seen them quite as nobly developed in the lives 
of women as in the lives of men. 

I John Stuart Mill : "Autobiography," pp. 46, 47. 



LECT. VIII.] TEXTS FOR " MORAL'' SERMONS. 249 

For your ethical sermons you may find appropriate 
texts in the innumerable moral precepts both of the 
Old Testament and the New. You will also find 
in the biographical and historical incidents of the 
Bible admirable subjects for sermons of this kind. 
Rebekah's treatment of Jacob may bring home to 
parents the sin of parental partiality. Jacob's treachery 
to Esau will enable you to show that devout men may 
be guilty of the basest conduct to men who profess 
no religious earnestness. Joseph telling his dreams is 
an illustration of youthful vanity and conceit. The 
story of the spies you can use to condemn cowardice 
as well as unbelief The chaotic history of the Jewish 
people during the time of the Judges is a warning to 
nations of the perils which threaten them when they 
shrink from the vigorous and thorough suppression 
of moral evils which threaten the unity and stability 
of the national life. The history of David and of 
Solomon is full of ethical instruction on every page. 
The history of Jeremiah is a perpetual condemnation 
of the popular intolerance of men who assert unwel- 
come truths. St. Paul's kindly words in the last 
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans — " Salute 
Tryphena and Tryphosa, who labour in the Lord. 
Salute the beloved Persis, which laboured much in 
the Lord " — may teach Christian people to repress 
their miserable jealousy when the work of others 
receives higher and warmer commendation than their 
own. And where can you find a more effective rebuke 
of that intense selfishness which takes the form of a 



250 SECULAR WORK SACRED. [lect. viii. 

morbid craving for sympathy, than in Epaphroditus, 
who, as St. Paul tells the Philippians, was " full of 
heaviness " because his friends at Philippi " had heard 
that he had been sick"? He had been in greater 
danger than they imagined, for " he was sick nigh 
unto death ; " and yet it distressed him that his 
brethren should have known anything about his 
illness. 

But we have not merely to deal with the details 
of moral conduct, with particular virtues and particular 
vices ; we have to make clear to our congregations the 
ultimate laws and aims of the Christian life. There 
are many Christian people whose conception of the 
relation of Christ's authority to their common occupa- 
tions and pursuits is fundamentally false. They call 
Christ their Master, and yet they seem to imagine 
that for six days in the week their time is their own, 
and that they are at liberty to work for themselves. 
The farmer, the builder, the manufacturer, suppose 
that after they have surrendered themselves to Christ 
as His "servants," His "slaves," they are just as free 
as they were before to carry on their business for 
their own profit, so long as they do not violate the 
laws of common morality. A sharp line is drawn 
between the Christian ministry and all other occu- 
pations. We ministers have a right to receive 
adequate support, but if it were our object to " make 
money " by the ministry, the universal sentiment 
of the Church would condemn us as profane and 
irreligious persons. It would be of no avail to plead 



I 



LECT. VIII.] SECULAR WORK SACRED. 251 

that all the means we used were perfectly legitimate, 
that we violated no moral law, that we preached 
sound doctrine, tried hard to make bad men good 
and good men better : we should be told that we 
cannot serve Christ and Mammon, that if a minister 
sets his heart upon " making money " by his ministry 
he ceases to be a true servant of Christ. 

Are we the servants of Christ, and are the people, 
at least for six days in the week, the servants of 
Mammon } Do we belong to Christ, and do they 
belong to themselves } Are we temples of the Holy 
Ghost — our whole life being set apart to sacred 
purposes, filled with the presence and glory of 
God — and are we to teach the people that their 
life — the greater part of it at least — is a mere store, 
or counting-house, or cotton-mill, and that they must 
be satisfied with having a little chapel built on at the 
end of it, covering only a seventh part of the site } 
I decline to be a party to that atrocious conspiracy 
against the prerogatives of the commonalty of the 
Church, which has invested the life of the priesthood 
with a sacredness that does not belong to the life 
of the people. We are all Christ's servants, though 
we have to serve Him in different ways. " By one 
Spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we 
be Jews or Gentiles, bond or free," lawyers or phy- 
sicians, artists or schoolmasters, manufacturers or 
farmers, merchants or ministers ; " and have been all 
made to drink of one Spirit. For the body is not 
one member, but many." 



252 SECULAR WORK SACRED. [lect. viii. 

It is our function, as ministers, to satisfy the wants 
and to contribute to the strength and joy of the 
higher life of man. But men have a physical as well 
as a spiritual nature. There are other wants than those 
which we are appointed to satisfy, and there are other 
forms of strength and joy than those to which we are 
appointed to contribute. The race would perish with 
hunger if all men gave themseh^es to " prayer and the 
ministry of the Word," and if there were none to 
" serve tables." We say that God opens His hand 
and satisfies the wants of every living thing. Behind 
the mystery of the life which is hidden in the seed, 
behind the fruitful qualities of the soil, behind the 
soft spring rains and the heat of the summer sun, 
we recognise the Divine presence and power. But 
if the harvest is God's gift, the farmer is God's 
servant. While he ploughs the ground and sows the 
seed and reaps the brown corn, he may give God 
thanks that he is engaged in no mere secular work. 
He and God are working together, and answering the 
prayers of men for " daily bread ; " he is the minister 
of God's goodness, "attending continually upon this 
very thing." He serves God in the field, as we serve 
God in the study and in the pulpit. As it is ourfirst duty 
to bring out of God's supernatural revelation whatever 
it can be made to yield for the spiritual life of man, it 
is his first duty to bring out of God's material world 
whatever it can be made to yield for the physical life 
of man. The farmer has to get his own living while 
he is providing for the wants of others ; but this is 



LECT. VIII.] THE FARMER AND THE BUILDER. 253 

true of the preacher ; the ox is not to be muzzled 
that treadeth out the corn. But the preacher, if his 
heart is right, and if he understands the true idea 
of the ministry, does not work to " make money," but 
because God has appointed him to minister to the 
spiritual wants of mankind ; and the farmer, if his 
heart is right, and if he understands the true idea 
of farming, does not work to "make money," but 
because God has appointed him to minister to the 
physical wants of mankind. 

Every profession and occupation that men call sec- 
ular becomes a good work and a part of the religious 
life when it is carried on in this spirit and with these 
aims. One man — perhaps he may be a Christian man — 
who has been a builder for thirty or forty years, and 
who has been, as the world says, " successful," has 
nothing to show except the hundred or two hundred 
thousand dollars which he has made out of his busi- 
ness. It was for this that he worked, and this is the 
net gain of his work. Another man in the same trade 
but with higher conceptions of it may have accumu- 
lated less or more, but his dollars are to him the least 
important result of his thirty or forty years in the 
building trade. He has been serving God all the time, 
and his true reward will come when he stands at last 
in God's presence to hear God's judgment on his ser- 
vice. Even now it is not his dollars which give him 
the greatest satisfaction. As he passes the schools 
and the churches which he built, it is pleasant to him 
to remember that he, too, has had a share in providing 



254 THE ARTIST. [lect. viii. 

for the education of children and for the worship of God. 
As he Hes awake on a winter's night, and hears the 
wind and the rain on the windows, he thinks of hun- 
dreds of houses built by himself, with strong walls and 
sound roofs, that are giving a shelter from the storm to 
sick people, and to aged men and women, and to boys 
and girls whose sound sleep the wind and the rain do 
not disturb, and he thanks God that he was permitted 
to do so good a work for mankind. What are the 
dollars, compared with the consciousness of having 
used life for a kindly purpose } 

The artist who has worked at his art in the same 
temper has similar rewards. He may have received 
great prices for his pictures, and have become famous, 
but neither his wealth nor his fame is the chief source 
of his joy. He remembers the sunset which he saw 
on the sea twenty years ago — the magnificent masses of 
purple and the throbbing lines of fire in the heavens 
above, and the splendour that rested on the rocks and 
the water beneath. It was God who gave men that 
vision of glory, but had it not been for him it would 
have faded away from human memory for ever : the 
glory is still glowing on his canvas in the gallery of 
some remote city, and is filling men with wonder and 
delight. Every year he has spent many months among 
the corn-fields that lie round quiet New England vil- 
lages, or on the banks of pleasant streams, or among 
the lonely hills, and he has taught men to see a loveli- 
ness and a majesty in God's works which they would 
never have seen for themselves, His paintings hang 



LECT. VIII.] THE JEWELLER. 255 

on the walls of city merchants, and are a perpetual 
refreshment to them. Engravings of them find their 
way into poor men's houses, and add something of 
grace and dignity to lives which are spent in exhaust- 
ing toil. He has not lived in vain. God gave him 
noble work to do, and he has done it. 

There is no legitimate trade which may not receive 
consecration. How charming a life, for instance, may 
be the life of the jeweller. He is employed by God to 
get precious stones from distant lands — diamonds and 
emeralds and sapphires — stones which God made for 
ornament and beauty. He sets them in gold curiously 
worked, and then they are ready to give a new bril- 
liance to womanly loveliness which seemed already 
perfect, and to be the graceful expression and enduring 
memorial of human affection. The husband brings 
home the costly bracelet, and as the wife clasps it on 
her arm she is happy that after twenty years of mar- 
riage her husband's heart clings to her still. The child 
puts on her necklet, and thinks less of the pearls than 
of the dear love of the father who has given them to 
her. The young man, far from home, is strengthened 
in right doing by the face of his mother in his locket, 
or perhaps by a face which his mother, with a sigh, 
must be content should be dearer to him than her own. 
A jeweller's work is beautiful in itself ; in its uses it is 
more beautiful still. He may thank God for appoint- 
ing him to so pleasant a service. 

Every trade and profession is vulgarised and debased, 
becomes " of the earth, earthy," when a man follows it 



256 PUBLIC DUTY. [LECT. viii. 

selfishly and simply to make money; when a man 
accepts it as the service to which God has appointed 
him, for the advantage and happiness of the human 
race, it is exalted and transfigured, and takes its 
place among the activities of the kingdom of heaven. 

In your Pastoral Preaching you ought not to omit to 
illustrate the law of Christ in relation to public duty. 
Perhaps you have sometimes met good people who in- 
formed you in a tone of spiritual self-complacency that 
they have never been in a polling-booth. They do not 
seem to understand that the franchise is a trust, and 
that it imposes duties. A secretary of state might as 
well make it a religious boast that he habitually neg- 
lected some of the work belonging to his department. 
The duties of an individual voter may be less grave than 
the duties of an official politician, but neglect in either 
case is a crime against the nation. I think it possible 
that the time may come when men who refuse to vote 
will be subjected to Church discipline, like men who 
refuse to pay their debts. The plea that the discharge 
of political duty is inconsistent with the maintenance of 
spirituality ought to be denounced as a flagrant piece 
of hypocrisy. It is nothing else. The men who urge 
it are not too spiritual to make a coitp in cotton or 
coffee. Although they profess to be alarmed at the 
spiritual perils of the ballot-box and of an occasional 
hour in a political committee-room, they are not afraid 
that their spirituality will suffer if they spend eight 
hours every day in their store or their counting-house. 



LECT. VIII.] PUBLIC DUTY. 257 

Their spirituality is of such a curious temper that it 
receives no harm from pursuits — no matter how sec- 
ular — by which they can make money for themselves ; 
but they are afraid of most disastrous consequences 
if they attempt to render any service to their country. 
The selfishness of these men is as contemptible 
as their hypocrisy. They consent to accept all the 
advantages which come from the political institutions 
of the nation and from the political zeal and fidelity 
of their fellow-citizens. They are quite willing to hold 
United States bonds ; they draw their dividends with- 
out any conscientious scruples ; they send part of the 
money perhaps to the Board of Foreign Missions ; 
the Sunday after the}^ receive it they put an extra dollar 
into the plate at the Lord's Supper. But United States 
bonds would be as worthless as Turkish 6 per cents 
of '62 if thousands and tens of thousands of American 
citizens did not devote themselves with courage and 
earnestness to the maintenance of sound political prin- 
ciples and to the defence of your political institu- 
tions. People who are so very spiritual that they feel 
compelled to abstain from political life ought also 
to renounce the benefits which the political exertions 
of their less spiritual fellow-citizens secure for them. 
They ought to decline the services of the police when 
they are assaulted ; they ought to refuse to appeal to 
such an unspiritual authority as a law court when 
their debts are not paid ; and when a legacy is left 
them they ought piously to abstain from accepting 
it, for it is only by the intervention of public law that 

18 



258 PUBLIC DUTY. [LECT. viii. 

they can inherit what their dead friends have left 
them. For men to claim the right to neglect their 
duties to the State on the ground of their piety, while 
they insist on the State protecting their persons, pro- 
tecting their property, and protecting from disturbance 
even their religious meetings in which this exquisitely 
delicate and valetudinarian spirituality is developed, is 
gross unrighteousness. It is as morally disgraceful as 
for a clerk to claim his salary from his employer after 
leaving other men to do the work for which his em- 
ployer pays him. It is a repetition in another form of 
the crime which our Lord condemned in the Pharisees 
who declined to give assistance to their poor parents, 
and excused themselves by saying that what their 
parents might have expected from them they had 
devoted to God. 

The public duties which you have to exhort your 
congregations to discharge are not exhausted when 
they have used their ballot-paper. In a free country 
every citizen should do something towards strengthen- 
ing public opinion on behalf of what he believes to 
be wise and just political principles, and towards 
maintaining whatever political organisation will, in 
his judgment, place the administration of public affairs 
in the hands of upright and able men. 

Nor is it only in the political life of this great 
Republic as a whole, or in the political life of their 
own State, that Christian men ought to be taught to 
take their fair share. Honest and effective municipal 
government lies at the verj^ base of public freedom 



LECT. VIII.] MUNICIPAL DUTY. 259 

and public order. It is by the discharge of municipal 
duties that men are disciplined to the true political 
temper, to the sagacity, moderation, patience, and 
courage which are necessary for the right conduct of 
political affairs ; and it is by encouraging men to 
watch their local administration with keen interest, 
that public spirit is formed and strengthened. 

The burdens which lie on those who take an active 
part in the government of a great city are very heavy. 
But the burdens must be accepted, and accepted by 
good men, or your common schools will be badly con- 
ducted, and the children will be badly taught ; your 
streets will be neither well drained nor well swept, 
and the health of the people will suffer ; your police 
will be inefficiently organised, and will fail to repress 
crime ; your public servants will be appointed by 
corrupt influence ; your finances will be plundered. 
For men who are able to serve the community by 
entering municipal corporations, to refuse to do it 
when their services are needed, is a dereliction of 
Christian duty. If they decline on the ground that 
the rough incidents of a popular election and the 
rough conflicts of public life are inconsistent with 
their spirituality, they should be taught that they are 
either suffering from an exceptional want of spiritual 
earnestness and vigour, and that they ought to be- 
come healthier and stronger ; or that their conception 
of the spiritual life is fundamentally false, and ought 
to be corrected ; or that they are playing the hypo- 
crite, and that it is time for them to become honest 

18* 



26o MUNICIPAL DUTY. [lect. viii. 

men. If they decline through sheer indolence and 
want of interest in public affairs, they should be re- 
buked for their selfishness, and taught that the supreme 
law of the Christian life requires a man to " look not 
on his own things, but on the things of others." 

When a Christian man accepts municipal or poli- 
tical office, it should be with the simple intention of 
serving the community. He has no right to think of 
his office as an instrument for increasing his own 
wealth, or for acquiring reputation, or for strengthen- 
ing his personal influence. His office is a public trust, 
and should be used for the public good without any 
thought of private advantage. 

It is our constant prayer that God's will may " be 
done on earth, even as it is done in heaven ; " our 
preaching should be definitely directed to securing 
the fulfilment of this prayer. We fail if we merely 
induce men to accept a right creed. We fail if we do 
nothing more than create religious sentiment and stim- 
ulate religious emotion. We also fail if the authority 
of Christ is excluded from any province of human life. 
In England I fear that the Christian ministry itself 
is largely responsible for an unnatural and fatal re- 
conciliation of practical atheism with Christian faith. 
In our preaching we have omitted to show the 
relation of Christian law to many of the most ener- 
getic forms of human activity. We have left what we 
have called the secular interests of mankind to be 
governed by secular aims and to be penetrated by 
a secular spirit, forgetting that if a man is a true ser- 



LECT. VIII.] PRACTICAL PREACHING, 261 

vant of God he serves God always and everywhere, 
and that Christ came into the world to bring earth 
and heaven together. We have even neglected to 
insist on the Christian development of some of the 
most important elements of human character, and 
have led men to suppose that the more vigorous 
virtues — the very virtues which are most necessary in 
the actual business of life — derive no inspiration and 
force from the law and truth of Christ, and from the 
great hopes of the gospel. We have insisted on pre- 
cise accuracy in the definition of difficult theological 
problems ; we have subjected spiritual experiences 
to a delicate analysis ; but we have been wanting 
either in the wisdom or the courage to insist that 
human life in all its length and breadth and height 
and depth belongs to Christ, and that no part of it 
can be withdrawn from His control without guilt. If 
we have asserted this in general terms, we have shrunk 
from illustrating in detail the relations of the law of 
Christ to the actual pursuits of men. We have sup- 
posed — some of us at least — that we have performed 
nearly all our duty in relation to the practical life 
of our people when we have discussed the legitimacy 
of balls and card-playing and the theatre, and other 
amusements of a similar kind, in which most of 
them could spend only insignificant fragments of their 
time. We have tithed " mint and anise and cummin, 
and have omitted the weightier matters of the law ; 
. . . these ought [we] to have done, and not to leave 
the others undone." From the cup of life we have 



262 PRACTICAL PREACHING. [lect. viii. 

Strained out the gnat, and left our people to swallow 
the camel. 

These fatal mistakes must be corrected, or the force 
of the Christian faith will be paralysed and its autho- 
rity will cease to command reverence and awe. We 
have not to leave the world to itself, but to conquer 
it. God intends that Commerce, Science, Art, Litera- 
ture, Politics, shall all be subjected to His law. Then, 
and not till then, will " the kingdoms of this world " 
become in deed and of a truth the kingdom of our 
Lord and of His Christ. 



LECTURE IX. 

THE CONDUCT OF PUBLIC WORSHIP: THE LIVING 
GOD : ORIGINALITY : THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST : 
CONCLUSION. 

GENTLEMEN,— In this closing lecture I trust 
that you will allow me to speak on several 
topics, each of them of sufficient importance to claim 
an afternoon for itself. The time at my command 
has almost run out, but there are three or four subjects 
having no intimate and logical relation to each other 
on which I should like to say something before I bid 
you farewell. 

First of all, I will speak of the Conduct of Public 
Worship. Before you have been very long in the 
ministry I think it very likely that your public prayers 
will occasion you great perplexity and humiliation. 
Your courage will, perhaps, fail altogether, and you 
will begin to ask whether your people would tolerate 
a liturgy. There is hardly a thoughtful minister 
of my own age, among my personal friends, who 
has not at times looked wistfully in that direction. 
Happily the traditions and instincts of our congrega- 
tions have saved us from the mistake into which our 



264 A LITURGY OR FREE PRAYER? [lect. ix. 

weakness might have betrayed us. Reflection and 
experience have convinced me that it would be 
hardly possible to inflict a worse injury on the 
life and power of our Churches than to permit 
free, extemporaneous prayer to be excluded from 
our services or even to be relegated to an inferior 
position. We need not despair. We, too, have re- 
ceived the Holy Ghost. He did not forsake the 
Church when the great saints of former ages passed 
away ; and if we rely on His inspiration, and de- 
vote to the substance, the spirit, and the form of 
this part of the service the thought and care which 
it ought to receive, our difficulties will soon be di- 
minished, and perhaps in time they will disappear 
altogether. 

The root of my own difficulties, and the root, as I 
think, of the difficulties of many of my friends, was 
a mistaken impression that extemporaneous prayer 
might include — in addition to its own excellences 
— the characteristic excellences of a liturgy. But we 
must make our choice. In extemporaneous prayer, 
the stateliness, the majesty, the aesthetic beauty of 
such a service as that of the Anglican Episcopal 
Church, and the power which it derives from vener- 
able associations, are impossible. We must be con- 
tent with simplicity, directness, pathos, reverence, 
fervour; and if we are less vividly conscious than those 
who use a liturgy that we are walking in the footsteps 
of the saints of other centuries, we may find com- 
pensation in a closer and more direct relation to the 



LECT. IX.] PR A VERS NOT WORKS OF ART. 265 

actual life of the men, women, and children who are 
waiting with ourselves for the mercy and help and 
pity of God. We lose less than we may gain. 

But we shall gain nothing and lose everything if we 
do not remember the true purpose for which prayers 
are offered. They are not intended to afford a special 
form of m-atification to men of taste v/ho feel no awe 
in the presence of God's greatness, no distress at the 
remembrance of their sin, no strong desire for forgive- 
ness and for strength to live a holy life, no deep sym- 
pathy with the sorrows and perils of mankind. They 
are intended to express to God the trouble and fear 
and trust of hearts which have learnt that their only 
hope for themselves and for all men is in Him, and to 
obtain from God those4)lessings which He has promised 
to bestow. Prayers are not works of art ; they are 
great spiritual acts. 

In the earlier years of your ministry most of you 
will, I think, find it wise to make definite preparation 
for your prayers as well as for your sermons. I am 
not sure that even those of us who have been in the 
ministry longest have any right to neglect that prepa- 
ration. 

A great part of the material for our prayers we may 
derive from God's thoughts about ourselves and the 
people with whom we have to pray. God's idea of our 
life, the idea which He wants us to fulfil, is the law of 
our conduct ; and we may be certain that God wants 
to give us the light and strength we need to keep this 
law. If the moral and spiritual perfection for which 



2G6 MATERIALS FOR PRAYER. [lect. ix. 

we are longing is nothing more than a dream of our 
own, then our confidence in God's willingness to help 
us is not likely to be very firm. We may trust God 
when we ask Him for power to obey a law which we 
accept from Him ; we have no right to be sure that 
He will enable us to obey a law which we have con- 
structed for ourselves. The love of God as well as 
His law — if His law and His love can be separated — 
will also suggest materials for prayer. The love of 
God found its supreme expression in the incarnation 
and the death of our Lord Jesus Christ; but the pro- 
mises of Christ, the large hopes of prophets, psalmists, 
and apostles, the consolation which God has given 
in times of trouble to those who have trusted in Him, 
the defence which He has given in times of danger, the 
victories which He has given over strong temptation, 
the light in hours of perplexity and darkness, also 
illustrate the wealth of the Divine goodness, and teach 
us what we may pray for. There is no height of joy, 
no depth of peace, no intimacy of communion with 
Himself, which God does not desire to make ours. 
When we ask for them we may not consciously receive 
them at once, but it does not follow that He has re- 
fused to answer us. A child who wants to go home 
is answered as soon as his father's consent is put on 
the wires ; but if the child is several thousand miles 
away, it may be weeks and even months before he finds 
himself under his father's roof. And, perhaps, after 
the consent has been given he may shrink from the 
long journey over sea and land ; his home-sickness may 



LECT. IX.] THINK OF THE CONGREGATION. 267 

pass off; he may prefer to stay where he is ; and so 
his father's arrangements for his return may come to 
nothing. It sometimes happens so with us. We ask 
God for great blessings, but when He answers us, and 
the path which leads to the blessings lies open before 
us, we have ceased to care for them, and we refuse to 
take a single step to reach them ; or soon after we 
have started we grow weary and turn back ; and then 
we wonder that our prayers are not answered. 

We may derive materials for prayer from the lives 
of our congregations — materials of inexhaustible 
variety. There is always sin to be confessed, sorrow 
which God alone can soothe and comfort, weakness 
that needs Divine support ; and there is always hap- 
piness for which we shouW offer thanksgiving. But 
we must be very indolent or else we must be cursed 
with a dull and unsympathetic nature, if we are satis- 
fied with a vague and general remembrance of the sin, 
the sorrow, the weakness, the joy, which cloud or 
brighten the lives of our people. In our- preparation 
for our public prayers we should think of the people 
one by one, and make all their trouble and all their 
gladness our own. There are the children — children 
whose faces are pale from recent sickness or accident, 
or whose health is never robust and whose spirits are 
never high ; children that are strong and healthy, 
with pure blood in their veins, with sound limbs, and 
who are always as happy as birds in summer time; 
children that are wretched because they have no kind- 
ness at home ; children that want to do well, but 



268 THINK OF THE CONGREGA TION. [lect. ix. 

who have inherited from their parents a temperam'^nt 
which makes it hard for them to be gentle, obedient, 
industrious, courageous, and kindly; and children to 
whom with the earliest dawn of reason there came a 
purer light from the presence of God, and to whom it 
seems natural and easy to be good. 

We should think of the young men and women, 
with their ardour, their ambition, their vanity ; their 
dreams of the joy and glory which the hastening 
years are to bring them ; their generous impulses ; 
the inconstancy in right doing which troubles and 
perplexes them ; the disappointments which have 
already embittered the hearts of some, and made 
them imagine that for them life has no gladness left ; 
the consciouness of guilt which already rankles in the 
hearts of others ; the frivolity, the selfishness, of which 
some are the early victims ; the hard fight which 
some are carrying on with temptations which are 
conquered but not crushed ; the doubts which are 
assaulting the faith of others ; the bright heaven of 
happiness in which some are living, happiness which 
comes from the complete satisfaction of the strongest 
human affections ; the still brighter heaven which is 
shining around others who are already living in the 
light of God. 

The enumeration, if I attempted to go through 
with it, would occupy hours. We have to think of 
aged people who have outlived their generation, 
and whose strength is gradually decaying, in lonely 
and desolate houses, uncheered by the presence of 



LECT. IX.] THINK OF THE CONGREGATION. 269 

living affection, and saddened by memories of the 
dead. We have to think of the men and women 
whose children are growing up about them, and on 
whom the cares of life are resting heavily. We have 
to think of places which are vacant in some seats 
because a boy is at college, or has gone to sea, or has 
just entered a house of business in a distant city, or 
because a girl has been sent away to recover health 
under some kindlier sky. There are other places 
vacant for other reasons : those who once filled them 
have forsaken and forgotten the God of their fathers. 
We have to think of families in the congregation 
whose fortunes have been ruined ; and of orphans and 
widows ; and of the young bride whose orange flowers 
have hardly faded ; and of the young mother whose 
heart is filled, all church time, with happy thoughts 
about her first-born at home. 

There are the impenitent of all ages ; and there are 
those whose consciences have been recently struggling 
to assert the authority of God, and whose hearts have 
been recently touched by the love of Christ, but who 
have not yet fully committed themselves to Christ's 
service ; and there are those who are thrilling with the 
unutterable joy of their first access to God ; and there 
are some, perhaps, who are becoming weary of the 
great endeavour to keep God's commandments per- 
fectly, and who are drifting back to a life of religious 
indifference. 

There is the work of the Church to pray for. And 
we should not think of the work as though it were 



270 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. [lect. ix. 

done by a great machine. V/e should remember the 
living men and women who are doing it — some of 
them glowing with the heat of early enthusiasm ; some 
of them beginning to be disheartened because success 
does not come as soon as they hoped it would ; some 
of them with the firm and settled habits of labour 
which have been formed by many years of loyal and 
faithful endeavour to serve Christ. There are neigh- 
bouring Churches to pray for ; there are missions at 
home and abroad, among Pagans, among Mahometans, 
among the adherents of corrupt Churches. The in- 
tellectual life of the nation, and its social and political 
condition, will also suggest materials for prayer. You 
pray for your President, and for the political men at 
Washington, and for the governors and political au- 
thorities of your separate States ; but you should also 
pray for your schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, and 
for your judges and magistrates. Somxetimes, surely, 
you should remember the criminals in your gaols and 
the criminals at large, and the compassionate and 
noble labours of the good men and women that are 
trying to reform them. Gentlemen, I believe in free 
prayer. You will believe in it too, if your hearts are 
open to all the sorrow and gladness, weakness and 
strength, conflict and hope, glory and shame, of the 
lives of men, and if you have a large faith in the love 
of God. 

In addition to preparing the substance of your 
prayers, it is legitimate, and some of you may find it 
necessary, to think of their form. You may collect 



LECT. IX.] COXGREGATIOXAL PSALMODY. 271 

passages from the Psalms, the Prophets, and the 
Epistles, which, in loftier words than you can com- 
mand, express adoration of God's majesty and holi- 
ness and glory. You may arrange the order in which 
you will use "exceeding great and precious promises." 
You may occasionally prepare tlie language as well 
as the substance of special petitions, confessions, and 
thanksgivings. Above all, you will remember that 
unless your own spirit is disciplined for communion 
with God, all other preparation will be of no avail. 

In England, after all that has been written on Con- 
gregational Singing, during the last twenty -five or 
thirty years, I doubt whether we even no\v appre- 
ciate the importance of Psalmody in relation to the 
spiritual life and temper of the Church ; and in 
Psalmody I include both hymns and the music to 
which they are sung. Some one said, " Let me write 
the songs of a nation, and I do not care who makes 
the laws ; " and I should be inclined to say, " Let me 
write the hymns and the music of the Church, and I 
care very little who writes the theology." 

Heresy and Orthodoxy alike have in past ages dis- 
covered and used the power of sacred song. Arius, 
though a keen and acute controversialist, did not rely 
on his logic alone for the spread of his doctrine on the 
person of Christ, but wrote songs for sailors, millers, 
and pilgrims. Chrysostom, when bishop of Constan- 
tinople, saw the crowds of people that were gathered at 
night and early dawn, in porticoes and in the open air 



272 CHOIR SINGING. [lect. ix. 

to sing the hmyns of the Arians, and to listen to them ; 
and instead of relying simply on his eloquence, al- 
though he was the most eloquent of preachers, he de- 
veloped the psalmody of his own Church. Bardesanes, 
the Gnostic, composed hymns and had them arranged 
to popular melodies, in order to propagate Gnosticism. 
Ephraem Syrus fought the heresy like a wise man, by 
writing hymns himself, and encouraging th(r faithful to 
sing them. Even Augustine wrote an elaborate hymn 
to fortify his people against the Donatists. In later 
times, the doctrines of the Lollards and the doctrines 
of the Reformers were propagated by popular singing. 
Descending later still, Charles Wesley's hymns and 
the animating melodies which were the delight of 
the early Methodists did as much for the triumphs of 
Methodism as John Wesley's sermons. And the sacred 
<5ongs which Mr. Sankey taught us to sing were hardly 
less important in promoting the recent revivals of 
religious earnestness in many parts of England than 
Mr. Moody's preaching. 

I have heard that there are many congregations in 
America where nearly the whole of the singing is left 
to the choir. There is only one hymn — so I have 
been told — which the people are expected to sing. It 
would be impertinent in a stranger to criticise your 
ecclesiastical customs, and perhaps the information 
which I have received is incorrect; but if any such 
custom began to show itself in England I should be dis- 
mayed. There is, indeed, no conceivable reason why 
people should not worship with all their hearts while 






LECT. IX.] THE SONG OF THE PEOPLE. 273 

they are listening to an anthem sung by a choir, as well 
as when they are listening to a prayer oftered by a 
minister. Some of the loftier and some of the more 
pathetic musical expressions of religious thought and 
feeling are beyond the reach of ordinary congregations. 
They must be entrusted to cultivated voices, trained to 
sing together. Nor can I see why those who listen in 
peace to a solitary voice from the pulpit should be 
shocked and scandalised if sometimes they hear only 
a solitary voice from the choir. If the singing is for 
mere display we ought to recoil from it, just as we 
ought to recoil from preaching which is for mere dis- 
play. If the singing is devout, whether it is a quartett 
or a solo, it may be a beautiful and noble part of 
Christian worship. 

But the congregations that always leave the singing 
to the choir, and never sing at all, or that sing very 
rarely, or that sing languidly and without any vigour 
and heartiness, do not know what they miss. In 
nearly all great revivals of religion the common people 
themselves have been inspired with a passion for sing- 
ing. They have sung their creed : it seemed the 
freest and most natural way 0/ declaring their trium- 
phant belief in great Christian truths — forgotten or 
denied in previous times of spiritual depression, and 
now restored to their rightful place in the thought and 
life of the Church. Song has expressed and intensi- 
fied to enthusiasm their new faith, their new joy, their 
nevv' determination to do the will of God. Song has 
consoled them in their sorrows, and sustained their 

19 



274 THE SONG OF THE PEOPLE. [lect. ix. 

courage in the presence of danger. When a great 
assembly — in a church or on the hill-side — has united 
in a mournful confession of sin, or a pathetic appeal 
to the Divine mercy, or in exultant thanksgiving for 
salvation, there has been created in a thousand hearts 
that vivid consciousness of sharing a common spiritual 
life which gives new energy to religious faith and new 
depth to religious emotion. When we find each other 
we are in the right way to find God. Sometimes, no 
doubt, when listening to a solitary singer — as when 
listening to a solitary speaker — a whole congregation 
may become conscious of sharing a common fear, a 
common sorrow, a common hope, a common trust, a 
common joy ; but this consciousness of a universal 
sympathy is far more certainly and far more strongly 
developed when the common emotion gives pathos and 
tenderness, vehemence and energy, to the great wave 
of song which every voice, the rudest as well as the 
most cultivated, assists to swell. This, I believe, 
explains in part the power which psalmody exerts 
over the religious life ; and I think that the explana- 
tion is confirmed by the fact that it is the songs which 
people have sung with others which they delight to 
sing alone. While they sing, they recover in some 
measure the consciousness of fellowship with other 
Christian souls. 

Believing that popular psalmody is to be valued — 
not for its mere aesthetic effect, but as a means of de- 
veloping and realising the communion of saints — I 
think that you should try to get good congregational 



LECT. IX.] THE '' singing-school:' 275 

singing. And by good congregational singing I mean 
singing which answers the purpose for which we wish 
the people to sing. The singing ought to be free from 
the faults which will make it intolerable to persons of 
cultivated musical taste, but it ought not to be of a 
kind in which only persons of cultivated musical taste 
can join. An ordinary congregation may sing in good 
time and with considerable expression tunes in which 
the rhythm is well marked, tunes which have a real 
melody in them, and in which the melody is not too 
difficult. These are the tunes with which we ought to 
be satisfied. To sing even these as they ought to be 
sung, most congregations will require some instruction. 
Judging, indeed, from the manner in which Mr. San- 
key's songs were suddenly caught up by immense 
congregations in England, there are some melodies 
which, as soon as they are heard, people who never 
sang before, cannot help singing. The Pentecostal 
" gift of tongues " seemed to have come again in a new 
form ; it was a " gift of song." But the wonders of 
Pentecost are not to be expected in ordinary times, 
and perhaps even the most beautiful of the melodies 
which Mr. Sankey has collected or composed for great 
revival services are not all that the Church requires for 
its ordinary worship. Instruction in singing will be 
necessary if your congregation is to sing well. 

In novels, from which we Englishmen learn most of 
what we know about your American country life, and 
in some popular American biographies, I remember to 
have seen the " singing-school " mentioned very fre- 

19* 



276 THE ''SINGING-SCHOOLS [lect. ix. 

quently, and in a manner which suggested that the 
"singing-school" is one of the most popular of Ameri- 
can institutions ; but I do not remember to have heard 
of its existence in your larger cities. Perhaps this 
is because the people in your cities have less time on 
their hands than the people in country places, or be- 
cause there are more exciting amusements accessible to 
them. Whatever the reasons may be, those of you who 
may become city pastors should encourage your con- 
gregations to learn to sing well enough to sing in church 
on Sunday. If musical cultivation is generally diffused, 
an occasional meeting of the congregation for " prac- 
tice " is all that will be necessary ; but if the people 
know nothing of music, you should try to arrange for a 
congregational singing-class. In England, when large 
masses of our population did not know how to read, 
the Churches said that every man, woman, and child in 
a Christian country ought to be able to read the Bible, 
and established schools to teach reading. If people 
do not know how to sing, I think that the Churches 
should say that every man, woman, and child in a 
Christian congregation ought to be able to sing hymns, 
and should establish classes to teach singing. 

The minister should take care that the tunes which 
are selected for the hymns are tunes which the people 
will be able to sing, and, what is equally important, 
tunes which the people will like to sing. I have heard 
complaints in England that organists and leaders of 
choirs are a touchy, sensitive race, impatient of minis- 
terial interference, more anxious to display their own 



LECT. IX.] ORGANISTS AND CHOIR-MASTERS. 277 

powers than to assist unmusical people to sing their 
best ; but I have never had the kind of experience 
which seems to have troubled some of my ministerial 
brethren. I cannot pretend to any scientific know- 
ledge of music ; but I have always held myself re- 
sponsible for the whole service, and my responsibility 
has been frankly and cordially recognised by the gen- 
tlemen who have superintended the musical arrange- 
ments of the church. 

Very much mischief might be averted if, in the 
selection of the organist and the choir-master, Churches 
remembered that the spirit of the man who has 
charge of the music is at least as important as his 
musical skill. If your only anxiety is to appoint a 
very fine player, the chances are that when you have 
appointed him his only anxiety will be to show how 
finely he can play ; and if in appointing a choir-master 
you think of nothing except his musical taste and his 
skill in selecting and conducting a choir, you have no 
right to be surprised if he justifies your appointment 
by thinking of nothing but his choir and the artistic 
excellence of their singing. 

The choice of hymns will, of course, be absolutely 
in your own hands. Some ministers act on the 
principle that a service should be a perfect unity, and 
their hymns are as far as possible in the same tone as 
their sermons. I venture to think that this principle is 
a false one, and that, speaking generally and leaving 
special occasions to be governed by a special rule, the 
hymns should be complementary to the sermon both in 



278 CHOICE OF HYMNS. [lect. ix. 

subject and in feeling. It is unwise to keep the minds 
and hearts of the people under a monotonous strain 
for an hour and a half They become weary, and it 
is a relief to them when the service closes. There are 
great varieties of mood, of external condition, and of 
spiritual interest in the congregation, which we ought 
to try to recognise. While there should be no abrupt 
and violent transition from one part of the service to 
the part which follows it, I think there should be 
movement and change. When I am at home, if the 
sermon is hard and lop:ical, I like to have two or three 
hymns throbbing with emotion ; if the sermon is pre- 
dominantly ethical, I look for hymns which give free 
play to lofty spiritual "thought and desire ; if the 
sermon is meant for light-hearted, happy people, w^ho 
are in the full vigour of their strength, I generally take 
care that there is at least one hymn for the weary and 
the sorrowful. The hymn immediately before the 
sermon should, I think, be in harmony rather than in 
unison with it. Nothing can be a better preparation 
for a sermon on the mercy of God than a lofty hymn 
of worship, celebrating the glory of His holiness; and, 
on the other hand, a hymn on the infinite love of 
God is an admirable preparation for a sermon on His 
11 flexible righteousness. Even when a hymn is sung 
immediately after the sermon, it is not always wise to 
make it a direct continuation of the sermon itself If 
we have been preaching on the 'Divine majesty, the 
people will sometimes put their whole heart most easily 
into a hymn on the Divine pity and goodness ; and 



LECT. IX.] A GOOD HYMN-BOOK. 279 

after a sermon on the future triumphs of the kingdom 
of Christ, we shall sometimes do well to ask them to 
sing a hymn in which they consecrate themselves to 
present Christian work. 

It is one of the infelicities of a minister when preach- 
ing away from home that he often finds all the hymns 
selected for him when he goes into the vestry on Sun- 
day morning. But even when he is at home he is 
sometimes in a difficulty : the hymn-book may have 
very few good hymns in it. I have no intimate know- 
ledge of the hymn - books in common use by the 
American Churches ; but if, after giving a fair trial to 
the book which you find in your Church when you are 
elected to the pastorate, you discover that it is a bad 
one, you should try by gentle means to induce the 
people to make a change. I know a book — not an 
American book — in which large numbers of the hymns 
are so chilly, that if you put a thermometer into it, the 
mercury sinks many degrees below zero. Cold hymns 
—no matter what fire there may be in the preaching 
— will encourage a cold and heartless religion; and 
weak, sentimental hymns will encourage a weak, sen- 
timental religion. On the other hand, hymns full" of 
generous trust, of ardent, reverential love, of manly 
vigour, of thanksgiving, of hope, of joy, will train the 
people to a noble, masculine, and impassioned piety. 

If you can get it, have a book large enough to give 
ample variety of choice. In a collection containing 
only three or four hundred hymns, ministers and 
Churches are " cribb'd, cabin'd, and confin'd." " But 



28o A LARGE HYMN-BOOK. [lect. ix. 

a large book is very heavy." Yes, four or five ounces 
heavier than a small one : and shall we impoverish 
the worship of the Church for the sake of having four 
or five ounces less to carry from home to church and 
back again, or for the sake of having four or five 
ounces less to hold in our hands when we stand up to 
sing ? " But a large book is expensive." Well, sup- 
pose it costs forty or fifty cents more than a small one : 
a hymn-book will last at least ten years, and the differ- 
ence of the cost will be four or five cents a year. Is the 
difference of sufficient importance to justify the harm 
inflicted on the very life of the Church by the use of 
a book in which you look in vain for the hymns which 
express some of the most vivid thoughts and some of 
the strongest emotions with which the Church is in- 
spired 1 In England some congregations which do 
not hesitate to spend five or six thousand dollars in 
decorating their Church, grudge a thousand for a new 
hymn-book. I would far rather preach in a mean, 
dingy, ugly building, than use a poor collection of 
hymns. " But no congregation ever uses more than 
three or four hundred hymns, even if the hymn-book 
contains a thousand." I doubt it, unless the other six or 
seven hundred are not worth singing. But if it were 
so, we should remember that no two congregations 
will sing the same three or four hundred hymns, even 
if they use the same book. What I ask for is variety 
of choice. 

We should have hymns enough to enable the people 
to express in sacred song all the moods and expe- 



I 



LECT. IX.] HYMNS FOR THE SEASONS. 281 

riences of their changing life. It is my impression 
that some ministers have not discovered how won- 
derfully hymns may consecrate the common thoughts 
and common feelings of men. When they come to 
church on a bright spring morning, a hymn may 
transfigure and exalt the physical and aesthetic de- 
light with which they welcome the returning life of 
Nature. 

" The glory of the Spring, how sweet ! 
The new-born life, how glad ! 
What joy the happy earth to greet, 
In new bright raiment clad. 
# * # * 

" Divine Renewer ! Thee I bless, 
I greet Thy going forth ; 
I love Thee in the loveliness 
Of Thy renewed earth. 

" But O these wonders of Thy grace, 
These nobler works of Thine, 
These marvels sweeter far to trace, 
These new births more divine. 
* * * # 

" Creator Spirit, work in me 

These wonders sweet of Thine ! 
Divine Renewer, graciously 
Renew this heart of mine."— T. H. GiLL. 

And when 

" Summer suns are glowing 
Over land and sea, 
Happy light is flowing 
Bountiful and free;" 

it IS a good thing for the congregation to rise from 
the visible splendour, and to exult that 



282 HYMNS FOR THE SEASONS. [lect. ix. 

*' God's free mercy streamcth 

Over all the world, 
And His banner gleameth 

Everywhere unfurled. 
Broad and deep and glorious 

As the heaven above, 
Shines in might victorious 

His eternal love." 

When farmers come to church through a kindly 
rain that is falHng after a long drought, why should 
we be satisfied with a sentence of thanksgiving in the 
prayer ? Let them sing — 

" The river of God 

The pastures hath bless'd, 
The dry wither'd sod 
In greenness is dress'd. 

** And every fold 

Shall teem with its sheep, 
With harvests of gold 
The fields shall be deep. 

" The vales shall rejoice 
With laughter and song, 
And man's grateful voice 

The music prolong." — A. L. P. 

And when in some village on the coast of Maine, 
or Massachusetts, or Rhode Island, a congregation is 
gathered on a stormy winter afternoon, and there 
are many hearts filled with anxiety about husbands, 
brothers, sons, who are likely to have a rough and 
perhaps a dangerous night on the Atlantic, with what 
a depth of feeling will they sing — ■ 

" Eternal Father, strong to save, 
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave. 



LECT.ix.] NATIONAL HYMNS. 283 

Who bidst the mighty ocean deep 

Its own appointed Hmits keep ; 

O hear us when we cry to Thee 

For those in peril on the sea." — W. Whiting. 

Sometimes our hymns should take a wider range. 
The Jewish psalms are full of thanksgivings to God 
for His great goodness to the Jewish nation, for the 
pleasant country which He had given them, for the 
deliverances which He had wrought for them in hours 
of national peril. They recall the memory of the 
great men He had raised up among them — " Moses 
his servant, and Aaron whom he had chosen ; " 
Samuel the prophet, and David the king. There are 
lamentations over public calamities, and vehement 
appeals to the Divine pity. Is there any reason why 
the American people should not praise God for His 
goodness to themselves } This vast continent, stretch- 
ing from the Atlantic to the Pacific — is it not the 
land which God gave to your fathers } The skies that 
bend over you in Connecticut and Ohio — are they not 
bright with the same sun that shone in the old days on 
the fields of Bethlehem, when David watched his 
father's sheep } Is there any reason why you should 
not translate into new forms the ancient strain of the 
Psalmist — " The heavens are thine, the earth also is 
thine ; as for the world and the fulness thereof, thou 
hast created them " .? " Tabor and Hermon," sang the 
Psalmist, " shall rejoice in thy name," — and have the 
mountains of this New World no songs of praise for 
Him } Have they forgotten the God by whose 
strength their eternal foundations were laid } or do 



284 NATIONAL HYMNS. [lect. ix. 

they seem to be silent, only because the ears which 
ought to catch their music are heavy and dull ? 

Has God wrought no deliverances for you and for 
your fathers ? Has He not brought you through great 
sufferings and great dangers ? Can you not say, like 
the ancient saints, " We went through fire and through 
water, but thou broughtest us out into a wealthy 
place " ? Has He not taught your hands to war and 
your fingers to fight ? In times of fear and sore per- 
plexity, has He not sent you men of noble courage 
and great sagacity and stainless devotion to the public 
good ? Why should you not sing of the mercy of 
God which has followed this majestic Union of States 
all the days of its life, and confess that it is to God 
that you owe all your greatness and wealth and 
power ? 

The history of the Jews is our history. Our re- 
ligious life still receives strength and guidance from the 
faith of Abraham, the troubles of Jacob, the exodus 
from Egypt, and the wanderings in the wilderness. I 
can therefore sing with all my heart about the- national 
blessings which God bestowed upon the Jewish race 
three thousand years ago, whether in the rugged verse 
which rose from many a wild glen and many a lonely 
moor in Scotland when the Covenanters were hunted 
down by the Stuarts, verse which blended the fires 
of devotion with the fires of patriotism, and added the 
courage of saints to the courage of heroes : — 

*'To Him great kings who overthrew, 
For He hath mercy ever ; 



LECT. IX.] NATIONAL HYMNS, 285 

Yea famous kings in battle slew, 

For His grace faileth never. 
E'en Sihon, king of Amorites, 

For He hath mercy ever ; 
And Og, the king of Bashanites, 

For His grace faileth never : " 

or in the smoother lines of Dr. Watts : — 

" Great monarchs fell beneath His hand ; 
Victorious is His sword ; 
While Israel took the promised land, 
And faithful is His word." 

But many things have happened since then — since 
the Jews crossed the Red Sea, and since they smote 
the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite, the 
Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite. God " made 
known his ways unto Moses, and his acts unto the 
children of Israel," but "he fainteth not, neither is 
he weary ; " and when I am conducting the worship 
of Englishmen I remember that England, too, has 
had its history, and I am not such an atheist as to 
suppose that in this history God has had no. part. It 
seems monstrous for us to sing about God's goodness 
to the Jews and never to sing about His goodness to 
ourselves ; and in these times when we are threatened 
with a return of dark and poisonous superstitions 
which we thought had passed away for ever, I am 
thankful for hymns in which the people can exult in 
the remembrance of the statesmen, the poets, the 
preachers, the soldiers, the saints, who, under God, 
accomplished in former centuries our redemption from 
sacerdotal tyranny. Let us thank God for sending to 



286 THE LIVING GOD. [lect. ix. 

the Jews in the time of trouble, Gideon and Jephthah 
and Barak and Samson ; but devout EngHshmen have 
quite as much reason for thanking Him that He sent 
Wychffe and Latimer and Cromwell and Milton, to 
fight and to suffer for the faith and freedom of their 
own country. " O that men would praise the Lord 
for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the 
children of men." For a Christian congregation in 
London, Birmingham, Manchester, or Liverpool, to 
thank God for the defeat of Sihon, king of the 
Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan, and not to thank 
Him for the defeat of the Spanish Armada ; to thank 
Him for the destruction of Pharaoh, and not for the 
destruction of the Stuarts ; to thank Him for the 
military triumphs of David, and not for the glory of 
the Commonwealth and for the Revolution of 1688 ; 
would be as irrational as to thank Him for the corn 
that was threshed out on the threshing-floor of Arau- 
nah the Jebusite, and to refuse to thank Him for the 
harvest in Kent and Essex and Norfolk last autumn. 

What I have just been saying rests upon a principle 
which has an important relation to the whole sub- 
stance and method of our religious thought. Our 
preaching deals largely with a very wonderful history. 
But the story of what happened in the tents of 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; the wars and captivities 
of the Jewish people, their national sins and their 
national chastisements ; the heroism of their prophets, 
the crimes of their priests and their kings ; would have 



LECT. IX.] THE LIVING GOD. 287 

very little to do with the lives of Americans and Eng- 
lishmen in the nineteenth century, if the history were 
not also a revelation — a revelation of the living God, 
who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. The 
teaching and the miracles of our Lord Jesus Christ Him- 
self, His death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven, 
derive their supreme importance from the fact that 
they originated and revealed the relations which exist 
at this hour between God and ourselves. Our faith 
rests upon a history, because the history reveals the 
God in whom we live and move and have our being. 

It is possible, however, so to treat both the Old 
Testament and the New as to create the impression 
that, although in distant lands and distant centuries 
God was active in the affairs of men. He is active no 
longer ; that His intimate relations to mankind were 
suddenly broken off eighteen hundred years ago ; that 
since then He has left the world to itself, with nothing 
more than a wonderful tradition of a diviner and 
more glorious age. 

Such an impression is utterly destructive of religious 
faith. Men instinctively refuse to accept a creed 
which is only a tradition. The sun is shining still ; 
the tides still ebb and flow ; every spring the earth 
clothes itself with fresh grass and flowers ; and every 
autumn a new harvest falls under the sickle. And 
the intellectual life of man is still restless, eager, 
and enterprising. From generation to generation it 
has continued to make new conquests — widening the 
region of human knowledge and augmenting by its 



288 THE LIVING GOD. [lect. ix. 

discoveries the wealth and power of the race. In the 
moral and social and political life of nations there is 
also constant movement and change. Ancient wisdom 
offers no solution of the problems which task the 
strength of every new age. Laws once salutary and 
just become obsolete. Venerable institutions by which 
great races have been disciplined to greatness gradu- 
ally decay. In every country where there is any moral 
vigour, where society is not utterly corrupt, where 
political government is not a rigid despotism, there is 
an incessant struggle for reform. 

Shall we look on all this activity with suspicion and 
alarm t Why should we 1 We, of all men, — we 
whose very function it is to assert the glory of God, 
should be the most eager to acknowledge the splen- 
dours of human genius, and to celebrate the intellec- 
tual triumphs of the race ; for " the inspiration of the 
Almighty giveth them understanding." We, of all men 
— we who have consecrated our strength to the study 
of the life and the thought of the Lord Jesus Christ, 
should be the first to honour the men who with 
equal patience and enthusiasm are investigating the 
structure and laws of the material universe, and to us 
their work should have an exceptional sacredness. 
They are enlarging our knowledge of Christ Himself ; 
" for by him were all things created, that are in 
heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, 
whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principali- 
ties, or powers : all things were created by him and 
for him." And we, of- all men, we who are constantly 



LECT. IX.] THE LIVING GOD. 289 

insisting that neither individuals nor nations can 
prosper unless they learn the Divine will and do it, 
should watch with the keenest sympathy and should 
warmly encourage the efforts of reformers and states- 
men to discover and apply the laws on which national 
prosperity depends. 

If, indeed, in the presence of this exciting and 
perpetual activity — this constant extension of man's 
knowledge of the Universe ; this prolonged and ge- 
nerous and not unsuccessful struggle to lessen the 
evils of man's condition, and to secure the triumph of 
righteousness and truth — we had to confess that in 
the sphere of Divine revelation with which we have 
to deal there has been no movement for eighteen cen- 
turies, that through the whole of this vast and desolate 
period God has shown no living interest in the for- 
tunes of mankind, we might well have reason to fear 
that the world would refuse to listen to us. 

But we have no such confession to make. God's 
relations to the human race are still real and intimate. 
His activity in human affairs has never been inter- 
rupted. The revelation of Himself in human history 
is still incomplete. He has not left us, in these last 
ages, with no other sources of knowledge of Him than 
those which are contained in His material works, or 
in the irreversible laws which are constantly receiving 
fresh illustrations from the social and political vicissi- 
tudes of nations. Nor has He even left us to make 
what we can of that supernatural revelation which cul- 
minated in the life and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

20 



290 THE LIVING GOD. [lect. ix. 

" He fainteth not, neither is he weary." I see the 
proofs of His mercy and power in the triumphs of the 
gospel on the day of Pentecost ; but other triumphs 
of the gospel achieved in later centuries manifest the 
same mercy and the same power. The conversion of 
St. Paul was an illustration of the Divine grace ; but 
every successful preacher is continually witnessing 
illustrations of the same grace in the conversion of 
men by his own ministry. Divine acts are not less 
Divine because they do not happen to be recorded in 
the canonical Scriptures. The last report of your 
Board of Foreign Missions is the continuation by an 
inferior hand of the story which was begun in the 
Acts of the Apostles. 

The miracles of earlier ages have ceased ; they are 
no longer necessary ; they ought to have taught us to 
recognise the permanent manifestation of the power 
of God in the orderly movements of the material 
universe. We no longer possess the special illumina- 
tion which was granted to the sacred writers, enabling 
them to bear authoritative testimony to the presence 
God in events for which historical philosophy 
might have attempted to offer a natural explanation ; 
but we ought to have learnt from the Holy Scriptures 
that the common lives of men and the common 
history of nations are under the Divine contiol. 

Gentlemen, I trust that you will not be mere reli- 
gious antiquarians. You will assert the present autho- 
rity, you will preach the present love, of the living 
God. It will be your endeavour to make men under- 



LECT. IX.] THE RIGHTS OF THE PRESENT. 291 

stand that the dream which came to Jacob at Bethel is 
a dream no longer ; that in Christ, heaven and earth, 
God and man, have been brought together. You will 
teach men that only in God's light can they see light, 
and that if they devoutly seek for it the light of God 
will come to them, and will illuminate both the ancient 
Scriptures and our modern life. You will insist that the 
moral and spiritual perfection to which we are called 
is beyond our reach until we receive the power of 
God ; and you will warn them against the superstition 
of supposing that they can derive moral and spiritual 
strength either from Divine promises written in a book, 
or from the memory of the manifestations of Divine 
glory and goodness in remote ages. The promises 
are intended to command our faith in God's present 
help : the history of His great and merciful deeds in 
former times illustrates the love and the power to 
which we can appeal in our own days. It will be the 
object of your ministry to prevail upon your congrega- 
tions to recognise the authority of God, and to honour 
Him, in all the common affairs of life as well as in 
their religious worship and in what they call their 
religious work ; in their homes, their trades, their pro- 
fessions, their amusements ; in literature, politics, and 
art To accomplish this object you must believe — and 
you must make them believe — that God is still " a 
God nigh at hand, and not afar off." 

Respect the rights of the past : assert the rights 
of the present. Sing the songs in which the saints of 
past generations expressed their trust and joy in God, 

20 ■^ 



292 SPIRITUAL INTUITION OF TRUTH, [lect. ix. 

but do not refuse the songs of devout men of our own 
days. Be grateful for the pathos and solemnity of 
Gregorian chants ; be grateful, too, for the brighter 
and more triumphant strains which have been written 
in later times by men who have consecrated their 
genius to the service of the Church. Welcome all 
truth — the truth in that glorious " Psalm of Creation " 
which appears on the first page of the Jewish Scriptures, 
and which reveals the personal relations of God to the 
universe ; the truth in the latest demonstrated results 
of scientific inquiry wdiich reveal the methods by which 
through unmeasured ages God has been bringing the 
order of this fair world out of darkness and chaos. To 
you, America must be sacred as well as Judaea ; and you 
will teach men that in New York and Washington, in 
Chicago and Charleston and San Francisco, they may 
be as near to God as were the priests on the day when 
the temple was consecrated, and when they " could not 
enter the house of the Lord " because it was filled with 
His glory. 

After w^hat I have said in previous lectures you will 
not suspect me of depreciating that knowledge of the 
truths of the Christian faith which we acquire by the 
study of Exegetical and Dogmatic Theology. But 
this knowledge, invaluable as it is, will prove inade- 
quate to the exigencies of your ministry. Is there not 
a direct vision — what has been called an intuition — of 
the great objects of faith } It is true thai the revela- 
tion which was made to us by the Lord Jesus Christ 



I 



LECT. IX.] SPIRITUAL INTUITION OF TRUTH. 293 



Himself, and which was illustrated by His apostles, 
must constitute the very substance of all Christian 
thought. No man who has discovered the dignity and 
glory of Christ, and who understands the greatness of 
the commission which He gave to the apostles, will 
ever speak as though it were possible for us to be- 
come independent either of Him or them. But the 
New Testament itself may be read in the natural light 
of the human intellect or in the light of the Spirit of 
God ; and until we read it in the diviner illumination 
we have no such knowledge of it as we need. 

There are very many men whose personal history 
is a commentary on my meaning. Their creed in its 
logical expression is very much the same to-day that 
it was twenty years ago, but they would tell you that 
though the same it is wonderfully different. The 
Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, for instance, they 
had long ceased to doubt. They had examined the 
controversy, and their minds were made up. They 
believed that He was God manifest in the flesh. Yes 
— they believed this, just as we believe that some great 
painting we see in a picture gallery is the work of 
Murillo or Da Vinci. The catalogue tells us so, and 
perhaps gives the history of the painting from the 
time it left the easel till it was hung on those very 
walls. But an artist comes in, and he does not require 
to look at the catalogue to learn that it was an illus- 
trious master who created those gracious outlines and 
that rich depth of colour. He knows that the work 
could not have come from any common hand ; he sees 



294 SPIRITUAL INTUITION OF TRUTH, [lect. ix. 

the genius in which you and I, perhaps, only believe. 
Time was when he, too, wanted the catalogue with its 
documentary proofs ; he may even now be obliged to 
appeal to those proofs against any who doubt, for his 
own perceptions cannot be made theirs ; but for himself 
evidence of that kind has become unnecessary : he 
knows the hand of the master on the canvas as we 
know the hand of a friend in a letter. And so there 
are many who would tell you that their belief in the 
Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, which once rested, 
and rested immovably, on granite foundations of 
authority, has passed into something higher and better : 
they read the Gospels and they see God in the face of 
Jesus Christ. It is as though they had been with Him 
on the Mount of Transfiguration, and had beheld His 
glory. Nay, there is something better than that ; for 
the splendour which was seen by Peter, James, and 
John, soon faded away ; it became a mere remem- 
brance ; while the glory which they behold in Christ 
is like that which shone in the Holy of Holies, a per- 
manent witness to the presence of God. 

But in the creed of many of us are there not doc- 
trines, facts, which have never yet risen out of the 
region of intellectual belief into that of immediate 
spiritual vision } Some of us can remember the kind 
of transformation which passed upon " the principles 
of the doctrine of Christ " at the time of our conver- 
sion : must we not acknowledge that there are other 
truths which have not even yet been thus transformed ? 
What I wish to say is that every one of you, before 



LECT. IX.] ORIGINALITY. 295 

your life in this university is over, should endeavour 
to secure from God the immediate and supernatural 
revelation of those great truths which must constitute 
the strength of your ministry. It is unnecessary that 
I should tell you how you are to secure it. Solitary 
meditation ; earnest prayer for Divine light ; devout, 
quiet, yet persistent efforts to see things as they are ; 
fellowship with Christian men, who, though they may 
have less learning than yourselves, have lived longer 
than you have lived in the presence of God ; a loyal 
discharge of all common duties, practical fidelity to 
the light which God has already given you — these 
will be rewarded by a gradual, sometimes by a sudden, 
manifestation of vast provinces of the spiritual uni- 
verse. Do not ask for the solution of the difficulties 
by which theologians have been perplexed and divided ; 
try to know at first-hand — to see for yourselves — the 
facts about which the Church is agreed. Human sin 
— endeavour to see it as God Himself sees it. Entreat 
God so to reveal to you His love for the human race, 
that it may become as real and vivid to you as the 
love which will change your mother's voice into music 
when you go home again, and will fill her face with 
light. Knowledge of this kind will give depth to your 
religious life, security and stability to your faith, and 
power to your ministry. 

Perhaps some of you will reply that the truths of 
which I have been speaking are the mere common- 
places of the Christian Faith, and that if a preacher is 
to have any real force he must be original. Well, if 



296 ORIGINALITY. [lect. ix. 

I may suggest anotlier and very inferior reason for 
seeking the kind of knowledge I have been describing, 
I will add that it will invest your preaching with the 
charm of originality. I remember that to many of the 
students of my own day originality appeared to be one 
of the chief excellences of a sermon. Perhaps to some 
of you it may have the same supreme attractiveness. 
Eloquence, you are perhaps disposed to speak of very 
lightly, as though it were a mere trick by which some 
men are able to invest with a meretricious brilliance 
the poorest and dreariest platitudes. That practical 
knowledge of the human heart and of human life which 
constitutes the power of some successful preachers, 
you have, in all probability, not yet learned to appre- 
ciate at its true value, and you cannot understand 
how it is that the men who have nothing else, achieve 
such considerable results. I am speaking, you must 
remember, as if you had the same way of thinking 
about preachers that prevailed at my own college 
when I was a student. We thought that there were 
hardly any sermons to be heard that were worth 
listening to. Popular ministers were the favourite 
objects — well, not of our contempt — but of our kindly 
and condescending patronage, except that now and 
then we felt righteously indignant that they should 
have won their reputation so cheaply. But origin- 
ality was the pearl of great price : w^e were ready to 
sell all that we had to buy it. 

Our estimate of the supreme worth of originality 
was not altogether false ; only, I think, that we some- 



LECT. IX.] ORIGINALITY, 297 

times failed to recognise it where it existed, and were 
sometimes imposed upon by a miserably paltry imita- 
tion of it. We have gradually found the cheats out. 
We have discovered that very much that seemed 
fresh and wonderful was only a grotesque distortion 
of the most familiar truths, or a weak and servile 
imitation of the mere intellectual mannerism of some 
writer of great — or, perhaps, even of second or third 
rate — genius. Originality of that kind is within the 
reach of every man that is fool enough to care for it. 
It is no pearl of great price, which all your wealth 
will hardly purchase ; it is what men slanderously call 
mere " Brummagem jewellery," to be bought for a few 
poor coppers. 

True originality is something different from this. 
It is not to be acquired by the m.ethods which some 
men adopt to obtain it. You may become singular, 
odd, ridiculous, absurd, by trying not to think and 
speak like other people, but original — never. i If 
you want to be an original preacher, look at heaven 
and hell, life and death, sin and holiness, with your 
own eyes ; listen for yourselves to the voice of God ; 
ask Him to reveal to you the glory of His love, the 
steadfastness of His truth, the energy of His right- 
eousness, and tell the world what you have heard and 
seen. Pierce to the heart of things. Get at the 
facts which lie behind appearances. In this way 
originality will come to you when you are not seeking 

^ " Ouand on court apres I'esprit, on attrape la sottise." 
Montesquieu: "Pensees Diverses." 



298 THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST. [leci'. ix. 

it. It will be unconscious,! and therefore will not min- 
ister to your conceit ; it will be part of your very life, 
and will therefore characterise more or less all your 
sermons, and not merely those on which you have been 
able to spend most time and labour ; it will not wear 
out after the first years of your ministry are over, but 
will remain with you as long as you have the clear vision 
of God, and as long as the spiritual universe lies open 
to you. While it will command for you the respect 
of those who are capable of forming a true judgment 
of your power, it will not provoke the silly wonder of 
conceited and undisciplined minds. It will save you 
from the humiliation of their foolish idolatry ; it will be 
out of the reach of their critical admiration ; but it 
will enable you to accomplish for them and for all 
your people the great objects of your ministry. 

Among the truths which with special earnestness 
you should ask God to reveal to you by the light of 
His Spirit, so that you may have a direct and 
original knowledge of it, is the truth of Christ's pre- 
sence with you in your work. His own words, " Lo, 
I am with you always " — words which express a fact 
rather than a promise — are directly connected with the 
command to disciple all nations. If this presence is 
revealed to you all your ministerial work will be trans- 
figured. The weight of anxiety which, if you are 

^ "Void comme je definis le talent : un don que Dieu nous a 
fait en secret, et que nous revelons sans le savoir." Montes- 
quieu : " Pensees Diverses." 



LECT. IX.] THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST. 299 

alone, will almost crush you ; the consciousness of 
weakness which, if you do not see that Christ is near, 
will sometimes force from you a bitter and despairing 
cry for release from the responsibilities of the ministry, 
will vanish, Saturday night comes, and you are 
thinking of the services of Sunday : your heart will 
leap when you say to yourself, " Christ will meet the 
congregation with me." You may be troubled by the 
fear that the fervour of your earnestness for the 
salvation of men has cooled ; but while seeking to 
rekindle it your trouble will be lessened, for you will 
say, " Christ will be with me, and Christ's earnestness 
will be intense as ever." You have done your best in 
the way of preparation ; but perhaps you have been 
interrupted in your work, or your brain has been 
sluggish, and you know that in what you have pre- 
pared there is less than the usual force and fire, but you 
will not be despondent ; you will say, " I have done 
what I could ; Christ will be with me, and He can 
invest this poor discourse of mine with power." 
Your own sense of Christ's presence may not be so 
vivid as it has been, but you will say, " Still He will 
be with me, and He will bless the people beyond my 
hopes, and theirs." 

It would be of no avail for us to preach at all if He 
were not with us ; we shall preach to little purpose if 
we do not believe that He is with us. It is still true 
that "he that soweth the good seed is the Son of 
man : " only as we are filled with His life and His 
thought shall we preach anything that will deserve 



300 THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST. [lect. ix. 

to be called a gospel. If 2£/^ always have the conscious- 
ness of Christ's presence our congregations will dis- 
cover it, and the discovery will assist to strengthen 
their faith in Him. 

It may be that there are laws which determine the 
manifestations of the supernatural power of Christ ; it 
is clear that these manifestations are related to the 
truth which is preached, to the spirit and manner in 
which we preach it, and to the earnestness and faith 
with which we entreat Him to have mercy on mankind. 
We have to discover and to satisfy the conditions on 
which the success of our preaching depends. But, after 
all, the quickening of the souls of men, and their sanc- 
tification, are as truly the personal acts of Christ as 
were any of the miracles of His earthly history. It is 
He who must forgive the sins of which we speak to our 
people ; it is He who must renew their hearts ; it is He 
who must give them strength for right-doing. It is not 
truth merely — no matter how sacred ; it is not spiritual 
motive merely — no matter how urgent, how pathetic, 
how glorious, how appalling ; it is not our own earn- 
estness — no matter how deep and how impassioaed ; 
that will move men to penitence, draw them to God, 
enable them to keep the Divine law. We have to 
rely ultimately on the power of the Spirit, and the 
power of the Spirit is the revelation of the presence 
of Christ. The presence of Christ is assured to us by 
His own words. To disregard it, to think only of how 
we ourselves can stir the hearts of our hearers and 
instruct their understandings, is to be guilty of an 



LECT. IX.] CONCLUSION. 301 

atheistic presumption which will utterly destroy the 
effectiveness of our ministry. 

Gentlemen, yours is a noble vocation. To be 
the ally of Christ in His great endeavour to save the 
world, — with Him to assert the authority of the 
throne and law of God ; w^ith Him to support human 
weakness in its vacillating endeavours to do the Divine 
will ; to inspire the sinful wdth trust in the Divine 
mercy ; to console sorrow ; to aw^aken in the hearts of 
the poor, the weak, and the desolate, the consciousness 
of their relations to the Infinite and Eternal God ; to 
exalt and dignify the lives of old men and maidens, 
young men and children, by revealing to them the 
things unseen and eternal which surround them now, 
and the mysterious, awful, glorious life which lies be- 
yond death — this is a great work. There is nothing on 
earth comparable to it. Whatever genius you have, 
whatever learning, whatever native moral force, what- 
ever energy of spiritual inspiration, will all find their 
freest and loftiest service in the work to which you 
are consecrated. And in the ministry, even the 
humblest faculties, if used with devout earnestness, 
may, through alliance with the power of God, achieve 
great results. 

However obscure your ministerial position may be, 
to whatever discomforts you may have to submit, 
however bitter may be your disappointments, I trust 
that your work will be always invested with the dig- 
nity and glory which now invest it, when in your 



302 CONCLUSION. [lect. ix. 

noblest and most sacred hours you anticipate in im- 
agination the years which are stretching before you. 
Give Christ your best. Be faithful to Him — be faith- 
ful to your people — be faithful to yourselves — and you 
will not have to exclaim when your life is over, " All 
is vanity and vexation of spirit." You will thank God 
that He appointed you in this world to a service 
which was the most perfect preparation for the larger 
life, the loftier activities, the everlasting glory of the 
world to come. 



I 



Manuals for AVorship, 



SONGS FOR THE SANCTUARY. 

The most popular of modern hymn and tune books. Several hundreds of thou- 
sands have been sold. The selections, and adaptations of words to music, have 
been pronounced "almost an inspiration." Separate editions for Presbyterian, for 
Congregational and for Baptist Churches, and with Psalter for responsive reading. 

The following forms are offered for selection: ^"^ Songs for the SancfMarij'''' 
(proper), for choirs and congregations ; " Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual Songs " 
(all the hymns set to music), for pure Congregational singing; and ^^ Chapel Songs'" 
(an abridgment), for the social meeting and family. All by Kev. C. S. Eobinson, D.D. 

THE BAPTIST PRAISE BOOK. 

Celebrated for the fuUness, variety and richness of its hymns, and for its happy 
combination of old familiar tunes with the choicest new and popular music. It is 
the favorite of the churches, especially city chru'ches, eveiywhere. Published in a 
standard edition, a cheap edition, an abridged edition, and an edition without music, 
to suit all wants. Compiled and edited by eminent clergymen of the Baptist Church : 
Eev. Drs. R. Fuller, E. M. Levy, S. D. Phelps, H. C. Fish, T. Armitage, E. T. 
Winkler, W. W. Everts, G. C. Lorimer, and B. Manly. 

HYMNS OF THE CHURCH. 

The selection of hymns and music in this beautiful volume is calculated to 
please the most severely critical taste, inclining to the classical view. The Eeformed 
Church has adopted it as the denominational standard. Editions with, and w-ithout 
tanes, and an abridgment {Hymns of Prayer and Pi^aise) for the chapel and social 
circle. By Eev. Crs. J. B. and A. E. Thompson, A. G. Yermilye, and Z. Eddy. 

EPISCOPAL COMMON PRAISE. 
The service, set to appropriate but not difficult music, with tunes for aU the 
hymns in the Book of Common Prayer. Adapted for congregational use. 

The HxiDfAL, with Tuttes. By Eev. Dr. C. H. Hall and S. B. Whiteley, Esq., 
with the endorsement of Bishop Littlejohn. A very superior edition. 

FOR CHOIRS. 

" The Quartet and Chorus Choir,'''' by J. P. Holbrook, associate musical editor 
of the "Songs for the Sanctuary" and the "Baptist Praise Book"; "-Pilgrim 
Melodies,"'' by J. E. Sweetser, as sung from MS. in the Church of the Pilgrims 
(Dr. E. S. Storrs) in Brooklyn; ^'' MetHcal Tune Book,''" by Philip Phillips; and 
" The Mount Zion Collection,'" by T. E. Perkins. 

PUBLIC AATORSHIP. 
Containing compbte services (not Episcopal) for five Sabbaths; for use in 
schools, public institutions, summer resorts, churches without a settled pastor ; in 
short, wherever Christians desire to worship— no clergyman being present. 



The Uxiox Pratee-Book.— For Public and Private Worship, with features 
which are objectionable to other denominations of Christians than Episcopal elimi- 
nated or modified. Contains a Service for Sunday Schools and Family Prayers. 



The Psalter.— Selections from the Psalms, for responsive reading by minister 
and congregation. By Eev. E. S. Storrs, D.D. 



Mther of these ivories will be sent to Pastors or Church Committees, for <ixamina- 
tion, free of charge— to be returned if not adopted. A. S. Barnes & Co., Publishers. 

I 



POETICAL WORKS OF RAY PALMER. 



The most eminent of American sacred poets is wortliily represented by this ex- 
quisite edition for the centre -table, embellished by a portrait on steel. It is the first 
complete collection of Dr. Palmers poetical writings, and includes, besides other 
matter, the entire domestic poem, " Home ; or, the Unlost Paradise," and all the 
beautiful hymns by the author of " My Faith looks up to Thee," in their proper form. 
Hy ^'Iremeiis^'' in the JVew Yo)-k Observer. 

Cowper and Kay Palmer— the first of these poets has been a f side favorite in 
Christian families for nearly a hundred years, and lives in the L cs of Christian 
readers as a writer of hymns rather than as the author of the more elaborate poems. 
But there is no one of the many poems of Cowper, now precious to the Church of 
God, more valued by Christians in this and all other countries than some of the 
hymns of Ray Palmer. His hymns seem really, many of them, to have been written 
under an inspiration of the Spirit of God, 

F'rom Ihe C/ticrtr/o oidvance. 

Dr. Palmer's Poetical Works are pervaded with the purest sentiments. His aim 
seems to be to clothe in choicest diction such thoughts and emotions as shall both 
please and benefit the reader. He does not seem less careful of his verse than of the 
thought it enshrines. Although much of it was written amidst the manifold duties 
of a large parish, yet it shows great care in its composition. Such a stanza as the 
one on page 55, beginning "Be thy heart warm with love faithfully beating," is, 
in euphony, not unworthy of the poet-laureate himself. 
Fi'om ihe Chicar/o 2'imes. 

A delightful collection of leaves in the form of poems, gathered irom the way- 
side of life by Ray Palmer. 

From the A^ew York Fvenmr/ ¥*ost 

Dr. Palmer, one of the most eminent hymnists of our time, in this volume has 
made considerable and valuable additions to our hymnology. The tone of these 
poems, though devout, is far from gloomj'^— on the contrary, it is cheerful and hope- 
ful, hopeful in the most rational and manly sense of the word. * * * * A longer 
poem in blank verse occupies some sixty pages, entitled, "Home, or the Uulost 
Paradise," in which the author eloquently sets forth the delights of a well-ordered 
home, in which the law of love, as taught by the great Founder of the Christian re- 
ligion, holds the difi"erent members in harmony with each other, and presents a 
picture of the highest happiness of which human life is capable. 
From the {Tiosioii) Conr/rer/aiionalist. 

It has become so common to speak of Dr. Palmer as the author of "My Faith 
looks up to Thee," &c., that it will be news to many to find that about fifty out of 
over ninety hymns, have passed into the various collections for the service of song 
in the house of the Lord ; so that in point of fact, if we mistake not, with the single 
exception of Dr. Horatius Bonar, Dr. Palmer has made larger contributions to our 
church hymn-books than any other living writer. 

From the JVen' York Tribune. 

Dr. Palmer's poems claim a certain unity in their purity of sentiment, devout 

religious feeling, and refinement of language. The author does not profess to 

have made poetry the leading object of his life. It has been only an episode 

his experience, but he has no reason to regret the fruits of its cultivation. 

From ihe I}id€pende7ii. 

All of Dr. Palmer's writings are imbued with the spirit of piety and purity; and 
even in his secular verse, Christian morality is ^q foundation^ or rather, the thing 
taken for granted. 

Richly bound iu cloth, bevelled boards, full gilt. Also in half calf (" Roxburgh "), 
and in full Turkey Morocco. 

A. S. BARNES & COMF^ANY, Publishers. 
II 



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